Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increased mitochondrial respiration maintains the mitochondrial membrane potential and promotes survival of cerebellar neurons in an endogenous model of glutamate receptor activation

It is thought that the combination of extracellular glutamate accumulation and mitochondrial damage is involved in neuronal death associated with brain ischemia and hypoglycemia, and some neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's disease. However, the mechanism whereby those two factors interact together to trigger neurodegeneration in this and other neurodegenerative disorders is still elusive. Here, we have addressed this issue using a model of mild and sustained accumulation of extracellular glutamate in cerebellar cultured neurons, which are mostly glutamatergic and commonly used to study glutamate neurotoxicity. The resulting stimulation of glutamate receptors triggered a ∼ 50% persistent increase in mitochondrial respiration that was associated with free radicals formation, and which was found to be necessary to prevent the collapse of the mitochondial membrane potential (Δψm) and apoptotic cell death. In fact, hampering the glutamate‐mediated increase in mitochondrial respiration with an inhibitor of the mitochondrial respiratory chain stopped neurons from producing free radicals, but led them to undergo rapid and profound Δψm collapse and apoptotic cell death. Thus, we suggest that the formation of reactive oxygen species by glutamate receptor activation is the unavoidable consequence of an increase in the mitochondrial respiration aimed to prevent Δψm collapse and neurodegeneration. These results may be relevant to understand the pathophysiology of those neurodegenerative diseases associated with both mitochondrial respiratory chain and glutamate transporter defects.
Subjective and Objective Visual Quality Assessment of Textured 3D Meshes

Objective visual quality assessment of 3D models is a fundamental issue in computer graphics. Quality assessment metrics may allow a wide range of processes to be guided and evaluated, such as level of detail creation, compression, filtering, and so on. Most computer graphics assets are composed of geometric surfaces on which several texture images can be mapped to make the rendering more realistic. While some quality assessment metrics exist for geometric surfaces, almost no research has been conducted on the evaluation of texture-mapped 3D models. In this context, we present a new subjective study to evaluate the perceptual quality of textured meshes, based on a paired comparison protocol. We introduce both texture and geometry distortions on a set of 5 reference models to produce a database of 136 distorted models, evaluated using two rendering protocols. Based on analysis of the results, we propose two new metrics for visual quality assessment of textured mesh, as optimized linear combinations of accurate geometry and texture quality measurements. These proposed perceptual metrics outperform their counterparts in terms of correlation with human opinion. The database, along with the associated subjective scores, will be made publicly available online.
A New Car Selection in the Market using TOPSIS Technique

Now days purchasing of automobiles i.e, especially cars in the market is very tough task to the customers due to day to day changes in various technical and operational parameter specifications like style, life span, fuel economy, suspension and cost etc. Therefore to overcome from this confusion state some selection procedure techniques are required. TOPSIS is one the selection procedure technique is adopted for this problem. This technique provides a base for decision-making processes where there are limited numbers of choices but each has large number of attributes. In this paper some cars are considered with different attributes and select the best car using TOPSIS technique.
NCS: incorporating positioning data to quantify nucleosome stability in yeast

MOTIVATION With the spreading technique of mass sequencing, nucleosome positions and scores for their intensity have become available through several previous studies in yeast, but relatively few studies have specifically aimed to determine the score of nucleosome stability. Based on mass sequencing data, we proposed a nucleosome center score (NCS) for quantifying nucleosome stability by measuring shifts of the nucleosome center, and then mapping NCS scores to nucleosome positions in Brogaard et al.'s study. RESULTS We demonstrated the efficiency of NCS by known preference of A/T-based tracts for nucleosome formation, and showed that central nucleosomal DNA is more sensitive to A/T-based tracts than outer regions, which corresponds to the central histone tetramer-dominated region. We also found significant flanking preference around nucleosomal DNA for A/T-based dinucleotides, suggesting that neighboring sequences could affect nucleosome stability. Finally, the difference between results of NCS and Brogaard et al.'s scores was addressed and discussed. CONTACTS jchiang@mail.ncku. edu.tw SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
From Verguenza to Echale Ganas: counterstorytelling narratives of Latino teenage boys naming oppression and unpacking community cultural wealth

In this ethnographic research, I analyze in-depth the experiences and counter-stories--through face-to-face interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations--of nine Latino teenage boys representing different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds attending a high school in North Carolina. This study uses Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latino/a Critical Theory (LatCrit), and Chicano/Chicana epistemologies as a theoretical framework to unveil how differing layers of oppression shape the lives of these boys of color through the intersections of race, gender, and class. Contrary to majoritarian assumptions, cultural deficit models, and their teachers' low expectations, this research reveals how participants used community cultural wealth (CCW) as a cultural asset to serve as a foundation to develop resiliency. Via motivational elements influenced by the participants' self-motivation, their parents, friends, and local institutions, this study unpacks how these boys learn to develop a support network that helps them navigate the school dominant culture and remain in school. Finally, this study also shows how these boys' parents' immigration stories, socio-economic status, and English language acquisition affect these boys' and their parents' lives as minorities of color in this country. The findings in this study suggest that teachers, school administrators, and staff could benefit from a better understanding of Latino/Latina students' community cultural wealth as a fundamental element for these students' academic success.
Book Review: The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension.

GREENSPAN, S. I. (1975). A Consideration of Some LearningVariables in theContext of Psychoanalytic Theory. Psychol. Issues, Monogr. 33. New York: Int. Univ. Press. -(1979). Intelligence and Adaptation: An Integration of Psyclwanalytic and PiagetianPsychology. Psychol. Issues, Monogr. 47/48. New York: Int. Univ. Press. WAELDER, R. (1930). The principle of multiple functioning: observations on overdetermination. In Psychoanalysis: Observation, Theory, Application, ed. S. A. Guttman. New York: Int. Univ. Press, pp. 68-83.
Activity Analysis as a Method for Information Systems Development: General Introduction and Experiments from Nigeria and Finland

AbstractThis paper investigates if the Activity-Theoretical methods of work development used by Engestrom and others can be transformed into a day-to-day methodology for information systems practition-ers.We first present and justify our theoretical framework of Activity Analysis and Development fairly extensively. In the second part we compare work development with information systems develop-ment and argue that in its less technological areas, the latter can potentially use the same meth-odologies as the former. In the third part, small experiments on using Activity Analysis during the earliest phases of information systems development in Nigeria and Finland are reported.In conclusion, we argue that the experiments were encouraging, but the methodology needs to be supported by further illustrative examples and training material. We argue that compared to currently used methods in the earliest and latest “phases” of systems development, Activity Analysis and Development is comprehensive, theoretically well founded, detailed and practicable.
Emotional Responses to Color Associated with an Advertisement

Dr. Terry Herman, Advisor Color is a vital component in advertising and product branding. It can represent certain brands or products. Color can be appealing but it can also be offensive. Therefore, it is important to specifically know which color evokes which emotion or associations to not offend someone or discredit the product. There are emotional and symbolic associations with different colors. It is important to understand these associations in order to properly select a color when creating a brand or advertisement. In addition, there are other factors with choosing a color, like competitors’ color choices and how the color relates to the product. This descriptive study explored emotional responses to colors used in an advertisement. A survey was created asking respondents to view an advertisement with a dominant color hue and select an emotional (positive/negative) response associated with the specific color. The Visual Communication Technology 103 course at Bowling Green State University was used as a sample. The sample included various ages and ethnicities. Results from the survey showed that gender does not affect the emotional response to color. However, results revealed that age and ethnicity does affect the emotional response to color and color preferences. In addition, color preference changed throughout the age groups and ethnicity filtered groups.
Energy Efficiency of Power-Adaptive Spatial Diversity Methods

The energy efficiency of power-adaptive multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) diversity methods is studied in this paper. The considered diversity methods are antenna selection (AS), maximum ratio transmission (MRT), and equal gain transmission (EGT) at the transmitter and maximum ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. The transmitter energy efficiency is evaluated using the average power amplifier (PA) efficiency and the transceiver energy efficiency is evaluated using the bit error rate (BER) as a function of average PA input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is a new metric. With the new metric, the effect of the PA efficiency is taken into account in the performance evaluation. The analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that larger diversity in the spatial or frequency domain improves the average PA efficiency in a system with channel inversion. The BER results show that the performance improvement from channel inversion diminishes due to the nonideal PA efficiency. Even though MRT is the received SNR maximizing transmitter diversity method, EGT requires less PA input energy per bit when a PA with nonideal efficiency is used. These conclusions could not have been reached using the traditional SNR metrics that do not measure the PA input energy.
Early Suppressive Mechanisms and the Negative Blood Oxygenation Level-Dependent Response in Human Visual Cortex

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of early sensory cortex often measure stimulus-driven increases in the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal. However, these positive responses are frequently accompanied by reductions in the BOLD signal in adjacent regions of cortex. Although this negative BOLD response (NBR) is thought to result from neuronal suppression, the precise relationship between local activity, suppression, and perception remains unknown. By measuring BOLD signals in human primary visual cortex while varying the baseline contrast levels in the region affected by the NBR, we tested three physiologically plausible computational models of neuronal modulation that could explain this phenomenon: a subtractive model, a response gain model, and a contrast gain model. We also measured the ability of isoluminant contrast to generate an NBR. We show that the NBR can be modeled as a pathway-specific contrast gain modulation that is strongest outside the fovea. We found a similar spatial bias in a psychophysical study using identical stimuli, although these data indicated a response gain rather than a contrast gain mechanism. We reconcile these findings by proposing (1) that the NBR is associated with a long-range suppressive mechanism that hyperpolarizes a subset of magnocellularly driven neurons at the input to V1, (2) that this suppression is broadly tuned to match the spatial features of the mask region, and (3) that increasing the baseline contrast in the suppressed region drives all neurons in the input layer, reducing the relative contribution of the suppressing subpopulation in the fMRI signal.
Maximising Spanning Subtree Scores for Parsing Tree Approximations of Semantic Dependency Digraphs

We present a method for finding the best tree approximation parse of a dependency digraph for a given sentence, with respect to a dataset of semantic digraphs as a computationally efficient and accurate alternative to DAG parsing. We present a training algorithm that learns the spanning subtree parses with the highest scores with respect to the data, and consider the output of this algorithm a description of the best tree approximations for digraphs of sentences from similar data. With the results from this approach, we acquire some important insights on the limits of solely data-driven tree approximation approaches to semantic dependency DAG parsing, and their rule-based, pre-processed tree approximation counterparts.
Fast Filtering Techniques in Medical Image Classification and Retrieval

This article presents the participation of the MIILab (Medi- cal Image Information Laboratory) group in ImageCLEFmed2013. There are three types of tasks for ImageCLEFmed2013: modality classification, image retrieval and compound-image separation. Image modality classi- fication and medical image retrieval are targeted according to MIILab's research interest. The main goal is to perform a feasibility test on ap- plying existing techniques on new applications, such as applying image denoising techniques on image retrieval and classification. Both global features and local features were employed. Fast filtering tech- niques were used to obtain global features on color, shape and texture. These global features serves to perform a pre-classification on images. Both low-level and high-level local features were extracted. Bags of fea- tures model was used to build final feature vector. Both kNN and SVM classifiers were tried out in modality classification task. Reciprocal kNN was used to perform result fusion in image retrieval task. The modality classification task was decomposed into a compound image classification and a non-compound image classification. Our approaches achieved 89.9% classification accuracy on training data and 85.1% on testing data for compound image classification. For non compound im- age classification, accuracy is around 68.3% on training data and 67.7% on testing data. The overall classification accuracy is around 65% on 31 classes. False alarms are mainly from large classes such as compound im- ages (312), X-ray images (101) and organ photos (63), but accuracy per class shows that performance bottleneck also comes from small/medium classes with large content diversity such as statistic figures, chemical structure and 3D images. Best result was around 80% (IBM research lab). For the image retrieval task, one baseline using SURFContext+BoF was submitted and the corresponding MAP (mean average precision) is 0.0086. Even best visual retrieval run obtained only a MAP of 0.018, which is still not comparable with textual approaches (average score 0.2).
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping - A Discussion

This papers provides two contributions to the problem of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM): First we discuss properties of the problem itself and of the intended semantics of an uncertain map representation, with the main idea of “representing certainty of relations despite the uncertainty of positions”. We propose some requirements an ideal solution of SLAM should have concerning uncertainty, memory space and computation time and discuss existing approaches in the light of these requirements. The second part proposes a representation based on sparse information matrices together with some properties that motivate this approach. This is shown to comply to the uncertainty and space requirements. To derive an estimated map from the representation a sparse linear equation system has to be solved. However, an update of the representation itself needs only constant time, making it highly attractive for building a SLAM algorithm.
A support network typology for application in older populations with a preponderance of multigenerational households

ABSTRACT This paper considers the support networks of older people in populations with a preponderance of multigenerational households and examines the most vulnerable network types in terms of loneliness and isolation. Current common typologies of support networks may not be sensitive to differences within and between different cultures. This paper uses cross-sectional data drawn from 590 elders (Gujaratis, Punjabis and Sylhetis) living in the United Kingdom and South Asia. Six variables were used in K-means cluster analysis to establish a new network typology. Two logistic regression models using loneliness and isolation as dependent variables assessed the contribution of the new network type to wellbeing. Four support networks were identified: ‘Multigenerational Households: Older Integrated Networks’, ‘Multigenerational Households: Younger Family Networks’, ‘Family and Friends Integrated Networks’ and ‘Non-kin Restricted Networks’. Older South Asians with ‘Non-kin Restricted Networks’ were more likely to be lonely and isolated compared to others. Using network typologies developed with individualistically oriented cultures, distributions are skewed towards more robust network types and could underestimate the support needs of older people from familistic cultures, who may be isolated and lonely and with limited informal sources of help. The new typology identifies different network types within multigenerational households, identifies a greater proportion of older people with vulnerable networks and could positively contribute to service planning.
Reframing Cultural Diplomacy: The Instrumentalization of Culture under the Soft Power Theory

Although cultural diplomacy has grown in importance in recent years, there is no consensus on its definition. Cultural diplomacy is commonly framed in terms of soft power: the capacity of persuasion and attraction that allows the state to construct hegemony without using coercive methods. In this article, I offer a critical analysis of this theory’s limitations. To shed light on this situation, I provide an historical analysis of cultural diplomacy. Based on this historical analysis and on an extensive desk research, I examine the dominant methodological and conceptual articulation of soft power in cultural diplomacy literature to clarify how the logical framework of soft power favors a specific and restrained conception of these policies, narrowing its understanding and legitimating its economic and political instrumentalization.
A Trust Model for a Group of E-mail Servers

E-mail services are essential in the Internet. However, the current e-mail architecture presents problems that open it to several threats. Alternatives have been proposed to solve some problems related to e-mail services, offering reliability and scalability to such systems. This work presents a distributed trust model, allowing to create dynamic and decentralized trusted server lists, through the exclusion of servers recognized as spreaders of malicious messages. The trust model uses a social network approach and defines strategies for trust information update, propagation, and storage. A prototype was built to evaluate the proposed model’s effectiveness.
Suprabasal Dsg2 expression in transgenic mouse skin confers a hyperproliferative and apoptosis-resistant phenotype to keratinocytes

Desmoglein 2 (Dsg2), a component of the desmosomal cell-cell adhesion structure, has been linked to invasion and metastasis in squamous cell carcinomas. However, it is unknown whether – and if so how – Dsg2 contributes to the malignant phenotype of keratinocytes. In this study, we addressed the consequences of Dsg2 overexpression under control of the involucrin promoter (Inv-Dsg2) in the epidermis of transgenic mice. These mice exhibited epidermal hyperkeratosis with slightly disrupted early and late differentiation markers, but intact epidermal barrier function. However, Inv-Dsg2 transgene expression was associated with extensive epidermal hyperplasia and increased keratinocyte proliferation in basal and suprabasal epidermal strata. Cultured Inv-Dsg2 keratinocytes showed enhanced cell survival in the anchorage-independent state that was critically dependent on EGF receptor activation and NF-κB activity. Consistent with the hyperproliferative and apoptosis-resistant phenotype of Inv-Dsg2 transgenic keratinocytes, we observed enhanced activation of multiple growth and survival pathways, including PI 3-kinase/AKT, MEK-MAPK, STAT3 and NF-κB, in the transgenic skin in situ. Finally, Inv-Dsg2 transgenic mice developed intraepidermal skin lesions resembling precancerous papillomas and were more susceptible to chemically induced carcinogenesis. In summary, overexpression of Dsg2 in epidermal keratinocytes deregulates multiple signaling pathways associated with increased growth rate, anchorage-independent cell survival, and the development of skin tumors in vivo.
Kinematic reductions for uncertain mechanical contact

SUMMARY This paper describes the methods applicable to the modeling and control of mechanical contact, particularly those systems that experience uncertain stick/slip phenomena. Geometric kinematic reductions are used to reduce a system's description from a second-order dynamic model with frictional disturbances coming from a function space to a first-order model with frictional disturbances coming from a space of finite automata over a finite set. As a result, modeling for purposes of control is made more straight-forward by getting rid of some dependencies on low-level mechanics (in particular, the details of friction modeling). Moreover, the online estimation of the uncertain, discrete-valued variables has reduced sensing requirements. The primary contributions of this paper are the introduction of a simplifying representation of friction and formal tests for kinematic reducibility. Results are illustrated using a slip-steered vehicle model and an actuator array model.
Adaptive combined denoising based low-dose X-ray CT reconstruction

X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) has been widely applied in clinical domain, especially in the field of diagnosis and treatment. X-rays is harmful to human health. Minimizing radiation dose as more as possible has been a significant concern in CT imaging filed. One way to reduce the radiation dose in the data acquisition process is to reduce the current of the x-ray source. However this will degrade the quality of the reconstructed image with strong noise. In this paper, we propose an adaptive combined denoising method for restoration of low-dose CT projection data (i.e., sinogram). The method unites LAWML and WienerChop in the wavelet domain. Simulated experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than conventional filters, such as the Hanning filter, in lowering the noise and preserving the image resolutions.