Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Actin Plays a Role in Both Changes in Cell Shape and Gene- Expression Associated with Schwann Cell Myelination

Schwann cell (SC) differentiation into a myelinating cell requires concurrent interactions with basal lamina and an axon destined for myelination. As SCs differentiate, they undergo progressive morphological changes and initiate myelin-specific gene expression. We find that disrupting actin polymerization with cytochalasin D (CD) inhibits myelination of SC/neuron co-cultures. Basal lamina is present, neurons are healthy, and the inhibition is reversible. Electron microscopic analysis reveals that actin plays a role at two stages of SC differentiation. At 0.75–1.0 μg/ml CD, SCs do not differentiate and appear as “rounded” cells in contact with axons. This morphology is consistent with disruption of actin filaments and cell shape changes. However, at 0.25 μg/ml CD, SCs partially differentiate; they elongate and segregate axons but generally fail to form one-to-one relationships and spiral around the axon. In situ hybridizations reveal that SCs in CD-treated cultures do not express mRNAs encoding the myelin-specific proteins 2′,3′-cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase (CNP), myelin-associated glycoprotein (MAG), and P0. Our results suggest that at the lower CD dose, SCs commence differentiation as evidenced by changes in cell shape but are unable to elaborate myelin lamellae because of a lack of myelin-specific mRNAs. We propose that F-actin influences myelin-specific gene expression in SCs.
Complete Genome Sequence and Comparative Analysis of Staphylococcus condimenti DSM 11674, a Potential Starter Culture Isolated from Soy Sauce Mash

Citation: Dong H, Chen J, Hastings AK, Guo L and Zheng B (2017) Complete Genome Sequence and Comparative Analysis of Staphylococcus condimenti DSM 11674, a Potential Starter Culture Isolated from Soy Sauce Mash. Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol. 5:56. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2017. 00056 Complete Genome Sequence and Comparative analysis of Staphylococcus condimenti DSM 11674, a potential Starter Culture Isolated from Soy Sauce Mash
A Study of the Effectiveness of Suffixes for Chinese Word Segmentation

We investigate whether suffix related features can significantly improve the performance of character-based approaches for Chinese word segmentation (CWS). Since suffixes are quite productive in forming new words, and OOV is the main error source for CWS, many researchers expect that suffix information can further improve the performance. With this belief, we tried several suffix related features in both generative and discriminative approaches. However, our experiment results have shown that significant improvement can hardly be achieved by incorporating suffix related features into those widely adopted surface features, which is against the commonly believed supposition. Error analysis reveals that the main problem behind this surprising finding is the conflict between the degree of reliability and the coverage rate of suffix related features.
CHROMOSOME EVOLUTION AND ANEUPLOID REDUCTION IN CALYCADENIA PAUCIFLORA (ASTERACEAE)

The striking paucity of detailed studies of chromosome evolution of diploid plants is especially surprising when one considers the great wealth of information such studies can provide. In addition to their elucidation of basic mechanisms of evolution, chromosome studies sometimes provide concrete evidence of phylogenetic relationships which may serve as critical checks on more speculative trends of evolution of morphological or physiological features. In a recent paper on chromosome evolution in Chaenactis, Kyhos (1965) adequately reviewed the earlier work in this field so that it need not be repeated here. Jackson (1971) stressed the need for many more sophisticated cytogenetic analyses of karyotype change involving studies of hybrids as well as parental types in order to substantiate or correct many of the generalizations about karyotype evolution. The present investigation examines chromosome evolution in the annual tarweed genus Calycadenia to exemplify the phenomena associated with chromosomal repatterning in self-incompatible plants. Calycadenia is comprised of about 12 species (d. Keck, 1960), most of which are California endemics. Chromosome numbers of n = 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 occur in the genus (see Carlquist, 1959), but polyploidy in natural populations has not been reported. The five species at the n = 7 level are very strongly differentiated from each
Energy Efficient and Stable Weight Based Clustering for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently several weighted clustering algorithms have been proposed, however, to the best of our knowledge; there is none that propagates weights to other nodes without weight message for leader election, normalizes node parameters and considers neighboring node parameters to calculate node weights. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient and stable weight based clustering (EE-SWBC) algorithm that elects clusterheads without sending any additional weight message. It propagates node parameters to its neighbors through neighbor discovery message (HELLO Message) and stores these parameters in neighborhood list. Each node normalizes parameters and efficiently calculates its own weight and the weights of neighboring nodes from that neighborhood table using grey decision method (GDM). GDM finds the ideal solution (best node parameters in neighborhood list) and calculates node weights in comparison to the ideal solution. In result, EE-SWBC fairly selects potential nodes with less overhead. The simulation results show that EE-SWBC maintains less average number of stable clusters with minimum overhead, less energy consumption and fewer changes in cluster structure within network compared to DWCA.
A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques

A research project applying artificial intelligence techniques to the development of integrated robot systems is described. The experimental facili ty consists of an SDS-940 computer and associated programs controlling a wheeled vehicle that carries a TV camera and other sensors. The primary emphasis is on the development of a system of programs for processing sensory data from the vehicle, for storing relevant information about the environment, and for planning the sequence of motor actions necessary to accomplish tasks in the environment. A typical task performed by our present system requires the robot vehicle to rearrange (by pushing) simple objects in its environment. A novel feature of our approach is the use of a formal theorem-proving system to plan the execution of high-level functions as a sequence of other, perhaps lower level, functions. The execution of these in turn requires additional planning at lower levels. The main theme of the research is the integration of the necessary planning systems, models of the world and sensory processing systems into an efficient whole capable of perf orming a wide range of tasks in a real environment.
Scan-Chain Reordering for Minimizing Scan-Shift Power Based on Non-Specified Test Cubes

This paper proposes a scan-cell reordering scheme, named ROBPR, to reduce the signal transitions during test mode while preserving the don't-care bits in the test patterns for a later optimization. Combined with a pattern-filling technique, the proposed scheme utilizes both response correlation and pattern correlation to simultaneously minimize scan-out and scan-in transitions. A series of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed scheme on reducing total scan-shift transitions. The trade-off between our power-driven scan-cell reordering and a routing-driven scan-cell reordering is discussed based on experiments as well.
Model predictive control for optimal portfolios with cointegrated pairs of stocks

In this paper, we demonstrate a model predictive control (MPC) approach to constructing an optimal portfolio consisting of multiple spreads of cointegrated pairs of stocks. It is shown that a conditional mean-variance (MV) optimization problem with any given prediction horizon may be solved efficiently when the spreads of stocks follow a vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Based on the solution to the conditional MV problem, we can apply an MPC strategy that calculates the conditional MV optimal portfolio with a given prediction horizon at each rebalancing period. We also perform out-of-sample simulations using empirical stock price data from Japan, and examine the effects of the length of the prediction horizon, rebalance intervals, and transaction costs.
Special Topic: Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine Targeting Stem Cell Signaling Pathways for Drug Discovery: Advances in the Notch and Wnt Pathways

Signaling pathways transduce extracellular stimuli into cells through molecular cascades to regulate cellular functions. In stem cells, a small number of pathways, notably those of TGF-/BMP, Hedgehog, Notch, and Wnt, are responsible for the regulation of pluripotency and differentiation. During embryonic development, these pathways govern cell fate specifications as well as the formation of tissues and organs. In adulthood, their normal functions are important for tissue homeostasis and regenera-tion, whereas aberrations result in diseases, such as cancer and degenerative disorders. In complex biological systems, stem cell signaling pathways work in concert as a network and exhibit crosstalk, such as the negative crosstalk between Wnt and Notch. Over the past decade, genetic and genomic studies have identified a number of potential drug targets that are involved in stem cell signaling pathways. Indeed, discovery of new targets and drugs for these pathways has become one of the most active areas in both the research community and pharmaceutical industry. Remarkable progress has been made and several promising drug candidates have entered into clinical trials. This review focuses on recent advances in the discovery of novel drugs which target the Notch and Wnt pathways. Stem cell research has been one of the most exciting fields in biomedicine over the past few years. It has profoundly improved our understanding of fundamental biological processes. The application of stem cells is a promising therapeutic modality, yet, cell therapy has a number of technical challenges and regulatory hurdles to overcome. In contrast, application of the principles of stem cell biology and the use of stem cells themselves as tools in the discovery of novel drugs may generate immediate returns because this approach is mature in terms of technologies and known regulatory pathways. In particular, the targeting of stem cell signaling pathways is proving to be a productive avenue for drug research. Over the past 30 years, developmental biology studies have revealed a small number of signal transduction pathways involved in stem cell self-renewal and differentiation that govern embryonic development. Among them, signal-ing cascades elicited by TGF-/BMP, Hedgehog, Notch and Wnt proteins are particularly important. Through intracellu-lar signaling pathways, these secreted proteins control the behavior of recipient stem cells or their differentiated progeny. As a result, the stem cells or differentiated cells undergo phenotypic changes in self-renewal, differentiation, proliferation, or migration. The concerted actions of these signals lead to specific cell fates and the formation of tissues and organs. …
What’s a life worth? Ethnographic counterfactual analysis, undocumented status and sociological autopsy in a wrongful death lawsuit

This paper asks ‘What is a life worth? ’ by analyzing the wrongful death lawsuit for Douglas Morales, an undocumented student who died in 2008 at 17 from brain injuries suffered playing football. The paper first examines how sociologists and New Jersey law monetarily value a child’s life, especially when undocumented status would have decreased long-term earnings. Second, it uses ethnographic, counterfactual methods to do a ‘sociological autopsy’ offering a plausible alternative, a more positive scenario – including a path to legal status – for Douglas’s future life. It uses interviews and document review to establish Douglas’s life habits, leveraging sociological and psychological research on immigrant youth achievers to predict higher future earnings. The paper advances ‘public sociology’ by deploying ethnographic, case-oriented methods to challenge the devaluation of this undocumented life, critique American immigration policies, and to help the decedent’s family directly.
Cohort Profile: The Nurses and Midwives e-Cohort Study--a novel electronic longitudinal study.

Nurses and midwives comprise the largest professional group in most national health systems, so shortfalls in numbers can have a substantial impact on health care delivery. A scarcity of human resources in health has been internationally recognized and has led the International Council of Nurses to launch the Global Workforce Project in 2004, and the World Health Organization to announce the Health Workforce Decade 2006–15 in 2006.1,2 Efforts to address workforce needs through coherent workforce planning and policy setting are hampered by the complexity of predicting the supply of and demand for nurses and midwives, and the challenges associated with understanding drivers of workforce retention.3 Available workforce descriptors among regulatory authorities vary considerably; and collections are mostly cross-sectional, frequently incomplete and typically limited to administrative databases. In Australia and New Zealand, workforce issues include the migration of staff between states and countries, and critical personnel shortages in rural and . [Full Text of this Article]
Internet experiments: methods, guidelines, metadata

The Internet experiment is now a well-established and widely used method. The present paper describes guidelines for the proper conduct of Internet experiments, e.g. handling of dropout, unobtrusive naming of materials, and pre-testing. Several methods are presented that further increase the quality of Internet experiments and help to avoid frequent errors. These methods include the "seriousness check", "warm-up," "high hurdle," and "multiple site entry" techniques, control of multiple submissions, and control of motivational confounding. Finally, metadata from sites like WEXTOR (http://wextor.org) and the web experiment list (http://genpsylab-wexlist.uzh.ch/) are reported that show the current state of Internet-based research in terms of the distribution of fields, topics, and research designs used.
Overproduction of dihydrofolate reductase and gene amplification in methotrexate-resistant Chinese hamster ovary cells

Stable isolates of Chinese hamster ovary cells that are highly resistant to methotrexate have been selected in a multistep selection process. Quantitative immunoprecipitations have indicated that these isolates synthesize dihydrofolate reductase at an elevated rate over its synthesis in sensitive cells. Restriction enzyme and Southern blot analyses with a murine reductase cDNA probe indicate that the highly resistant isolates contain amplifications of the dihydrofolate reductase gene number. Depending upon the parenteral line used to select these resistant cells, they overproduce either a wild-type enzyme or a structurally altered enzyme. Karyotype analysis shows that some of these isolates contain chromosomes with homogeneously staining regions whereas others do not contain such chromosomes.
Domain Adaptation with Artificial Data for Semantic Parsing of Speech

We adapt a semantic role parser to the domain of goal-directed speech by creating an artificial treebank from an existing text tree-bank. We use a three-component model that includes distributional models from both target and source domains. We show that we improve the parser's performance on utterances collected from human-machine dialogues by training on the artificially created data without loss of performance on the text treebank.
Integrating Global and Local Structures in Semi-supervised Discriminant Analysis

In this paper, in terms of pairwise constraints which specify whether a pair of instances belong to the same class (must-link constraints) or different classes (cannot-link constraints), we propose a novel semi-supervised discriminant analysis algorithm which integrates both global and local structures. Specifically, our objective is to learn a smooth as well as discriminative subspace. In order to achieve it, we jointly use both the instances in the cannot-link constraints to maximize the separability between different classes while applying those in the must-link constraints to minimize the distance between the same class and the integration of global and local structures of the data to make nearby instances in the original space close to each other in the embedding space. Experimental results on a collection of real-world data sets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Activation of Human Cerebral and Cerebellar Cortex by Auditory Stimulation at 40 Hz

We used functional brain imaging with positron emission tomography (PET)-H215O to study a remarkable neurophysiological finding in the normal brain. Auditory stimulation at various frequencies in the gamma range elicits a steady-state scalp electroencephalographic (EEG) response that peaks in amplitude at 40 Hz, with smaller amplitudes at lower and higher stimulation frequencies. We confirmed this finding in 28 healthy subjects, each studied with monaural trains of stimuli at 12 different stimulation rates (12, 20, 30, 32, 35, 37.5, 40, 42.5, 45, 47.5, 50, and 60 Hz). There is disagreement as to whether the peak in the amplitude of the EEG response at 40 Hz corresponds simply to a superimposition of middle latency auditory evoked potentials, neuronal synchronization, or increased cortical synaptic activity at this stimulation frequency. To clarify this issue, we measured regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with PET-H215O in nine normal subjects at rest and during auditory stimulation at four different frequencies (12, 32, 40, and 47 Hz) and analyzed the results with statistical parametric mapping. The behavior of the rCBF response was similar to the steady-state EEG response, reaching a peak at 40 Hz. This finding suggests that the steady-state amplitude peak is related to increased cortical synaptic activity. Additionally, we found that, compared with other stimulation frequencies, 40 Hz selectively activated the auditory region of the pontocerebellum, a brain structure with important roles in cortical inhibition and timing.
Voices of Elders

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate person and environment factors of elders that facilitate adaptation to relocation to long-term care skilled nursing facilities. Results represent findings from Phase 1 of three phases of a 2-year study to develop and test a cultural heritage intervention to improve adaptation to nursing home relocation. Design: Qualitative interviews were conducted with 23 newly admitted Caucasians and African Americans residing in skilled nursing facilities. Findings/Results: Themes that emerged include (a) spirituality, death and dying, and philosophy of life; (b) life experiences with change; (c) cultural heritage; (d) health; (e) ethnicity; (f) social support, family and friends; (g) long-term care facility (LTCF) relationships; (h) LTCF system maintenance; and (i) LTCF support of personal growth. Comparison of African Americans and Caucasians showed more similarities than differences between the groups. Discussion: Implications for research, clinical practice, and cultural heritage interventions for LTCF adaptation are discussed.
The GCL ANSI Common Lisp Test Suite

I describe the conformance test suite for ANSI Common Lisp distributed as part of GNU Common Lisp (GCL). The test suite includes more than 20,000 individual tests, as well as random test generators for exercising specific parts of Common Lisp implementations, and has revealed many conformance bugs in all implementations on which it has been run.
Combining Lexical and Semantic-based Features for Answer Sentence Selection

Question answering is always an attractive and challenging task in natural language processing area. There are some open domain question answering systems, such as IBM Waston, which take the unstructured text data as input, in some ways of humanlike thinking process and a mode of artificial intelligence. At the conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) 2016, China Computer Federation hosted a shared task evaluation about Open Domain Question Answering. We achieve the 2nd place at the document-based subtask. In this paper, we present our solution, which consists of feature engineering in lexical and semantic aspects and model training methods. As the result of the evaluation shows, our solution provides a valuable and brief model which could be used in modelling question answering or sentence semantic relevance. We hope our solution would contribute to this vast and significant task with some heuristic thinking.
D-band frequency synthesis using a U-band PLL and frequency tripler in 65nm CMOS technology

This paper presents a digitally controlled frequency synthesizer in 65nm CMOS technology for D-band transceiver applications. The synthesizer uses a low frequency U Band (44–48 GHz) phase-locked loop to track a 50 MHz reference and then employs an injection locked frequency tripler (ILFT) to provide output that can be tuned between 130 and 133 GHz. The proposed D-band synthesizer offers a directly measured phase noise of −82.5 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the carrier and consumes 92mW of power. The entire syntheszier occupies 0.68mm2 of silicon area.
Strength Without Elaboration: The Role of Implicit Self-Theories in Forming and Accessing Attitudes

A consistent finding in the attitude literature is that strong attitudes are products of effortful cognitive elaboration (Petty and Cacioppo 1984; Petty and Wegener 1999). The current research extends this by incorporating the construct of implicit self-theory. Specifically, it finds that that individuals who believe in fixed traits of personality (entity theorists) form strong attitudes without effortful cognitive elaboration. They form attitudes more quickly and with less effort but hold these attitudes more strongly than incremental theorists, whereas those who believe in malleable traits (incremental theorists) can form strong attitudes only with a high level of elaboration. The current research suggests that effortful cognitive elaboration is a sufficient but not necessary condition for attitude strength. The underlying mechanism for this strength without elaboration effect is also traced.
Segmentation of brain electrical activity into microstates: model estimation and validation

A brain microstate is defined as a functional/physiological state of the brain during which specific neural computations are performed. It is characterized uniquely by a fixed spatial distribution of active neuronal generators with time varying intensity. Brain electrical activity is modeled as being composed of a time sequence of nonoverlapping microstates with variable duration. A precise mathematical formulation of the model for evoked potential recordings is presented, where the microstates are represented as normalized vectors constituted by scalp electric potentials due to the underlying generators. An algorithm is developed for estimating the microstates, based on a modified version of the classical k-means clustering method, in which cluster orientations are estimated, Consequently, each instantaneous multichannel evoked potential measurement is classified as belonging to some microstate, thus producing a natural segmentation of brain activity. Use is made of statistical image segmentation techniques for obtaining smooth continuous segments. Time varying intensities are estimated by projecting the measurements onto their corresponding microstates. A goodness of fit statistic for the model is presented. Finally, a method is introduced for estimating the number of microstates, based on nonparametric data-driven statistical resampling techniques. <<ETX>>