Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Both the Amino and Carboxyl Termini of Dictyostelium Myosin Essential Light Chain Are Required for Binding to Myosin Heavy Chain (*)

Dictyostelium myosin deficient in the essential light chain (ELC) does not function normally either in vivo or in vitro (Pollenz, R. S., Chen, T. L., Trivinos-Lagos, L., and Chisholm, R. L.(1992) Cell 69, 951-962). Since normal [Medline] myosin function requires association of ELC, we investigated the domains of ELC that are necessary for binding to the myosin heavy chain (MHC). Deleting the NH-terminal 11 or 28 amino acid residues (ΔN11 or ΔN28) or the COOH-terminal 15 amino acid residues (ΔC15) abolished binding of the ELC to the MHC when the mutants were expressed in wild-type (WT) cells. In contrast, the ELC carrying deletion or insertion of four amino acid residues (D4 or I4) in the central linker segment bound the MHC in WT cells, although less efficient competition with WT ELC suggested that the affinity for the MHC is reduced. When these mutants were expressed in ELC-minus (mlcE) cells, where the binding to the heavy chain is not dependent on efficient competition with the endogenous ELC, ΔN28 and ΔN11 bound to the MHC at 15% of WT levels and ΔC15 did not bind to a significant degree. I4 and D4, however, bound with normal stoichiometry. These data indicate that residues at both termini of the ELC are required for association with the MHC, while the central linker domain appears to be less critical for binding. When the mutants were analyzed for their ability to complement the cytokinesis defect displayed by mlcE cells, a correlation to the level of ELC carried by the MHC was observed, indicating that a stoichiometric ELC-MHC association is necessary for normal myosin function in vivo.
Politics-Business Interaction Paths

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their different legal and/or electoral systems. In this paper we compare this view with the co-evolution approach based on the hypothesis that politics and corporate governance influence each other, generating complex interactions of financial and labour market institutions. Countries cluster along different complementary politics-business interaction paths and there is no reason to expect, or to device policies for, their convergence to a single model of corporate governance. We argue that this hypothesis provides a more convincing explanation of the past histories of major capitalist economies and can suggest some useful possible scenarios of their future institutional development. Bayesian model comparison suggests that the co-evolution approach turns out at least as influential as the competing theories in explaining shareholder and worker protection determination.
Operation and Performance of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols in Realistic Environments

Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure wireless communications are currently under development to improve traffic efficiency and safety. Routing protocols enabling multi-hop communications represent a major technology for information dissemination within vehicular ad-hoc networks. The high node's mobility and propagation conditions experienced by vehicle-to-vehicle communications require a careful routing protocol design to ensure its successful operation and performance under realistic environments. To this aim, this paper analyses the impact and importance of adequately considering physical layer effects to correctly quantify a routing protocol's performance, and understand its networking operation.
Wafer-Scale VLSI Testing

1 Introduction In the manufacturing of VLSI integrated circuits (ICs), it would be desirable that the ICs undergo an accurate test directly on the wafer, before they are cut and packaged. This would save the cost of bounding and packaging the faulty ICs, which may be a relatively large fraction. However, accurate testing on the wafer can hardly be supported by the consolidated technology of testing machines. For this reason, the test of ICs on the wafer is usually limited to providing power, ground and a few signals, and to checking some basic electrical properties. This results in a test with limited coverage, which is unable to identify all faulty ICs. The ICs which pass the preliminary test (which may include a relatively large fraction of faulty ICs) must undergo a more accurate test and are possibly discarded after they have been bounded and packaged, an this may contribute heavily to the overall cost of the manufacturing process. Another drawback is that the test on the wafer proceeds sequentially, since the test machine must step over individual IC, and this implies that the time needed to test the entire wafer is quite long. A different approach to the functional manufacturing test of ICs on the wafer can be based upon concepts inherited from the V\VWHPOHYHOOGLDJQRVLVVWKHRU\ [1], which was introduced to diagnose systems composed by units able to perform mutual test. A test involves two units and, in principle, proceeds as follows: the WHVWLQJJXQLW provides a test input sequence to the WHVWHGGXQLW, which returns an output sequence. The testing unit compares the latter sequence with the expected output sequence and defines a WHVWWRXWFRPH, which is binary: 0 if the test passes and 1 otherwise. The set of all test outcomes (called V\QGURPH) is input to a controlling computer (called GLDJQRVHU), which executes a GLDJQRVLVV DOJRULWKP aimed at identifying the faulty units. The diagnosis algorithm partitions the set of all units into set. of units declared good, set) of units declared faulty, and set 6 of units declared VXVSHFW, i.e. those units which the algorithm is unable to classify as either good or faulty. The diagnosis is said to be FRUUHFW if units assigned to set. are actually fault-free and those assigned to set) are actually faulty. The diagnosis is said to be FRPSOHWH if every unit is classified as either good or faulty, i.e. set 6 is empty. A well-known diagnosis …
Modification of "native" surface donor states in AlGaN/GaN MIS-HEMTs by fluorination: Perspective for defect engineering

We report on AlGaN/GaN MIS-HEMTs with a thermally stable dielectric/AlGaN interface induced by plasma fluorination. The plasma treatment leads to a modification of the "native" surface donors and a fundamentally different device and defect behavior. The feasibility of III-N surface defect modifications shows a new direction for reducing VTh drifts or the possibility of engineering the surface defects.
Multilabeling UAV images with Autoencoder networks

This paper describes a fast multilabel classification method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images acquired over urban areas. It starts by subdividing a given query image into a set of equal tiles, which are successively processed and analyzed separately. In particular, each tile is described by extracting opportune features which are then further transformed through the learning of an Autoencoder (AE) model. This last provides new features of reduced dimensionality, exploited to feed a multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier in order to derive the list of objects present in the considered tile. From the conducted experiments, it comes out that the proposed method yields interesting classification accuracies and much shorter processing times compared to the state-of-the-art.
Purdue University: Ece438 -digital Signal Processing with Applications Ece438 -laboratory 10: Image Processing (week 1)

This is the second part of a two week experiment. During the first week we discussed basic properties of speech signals, and performed some simple analyses in the time and frequency domain. This week, we will introduce a system model for speech production. We will cover some background on linear predictive coding, and the final exercise will bring all the prior material together in a speech coding exercise.
Hypoxia Inactivates Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase in Mouse Macrophages by Disrupting Its Interaction with α-Actinin 4 1

Nitric oxide, produced in macrophages by the high output isoform inducible NO synthase (iNOS), is associated with cytotoxic effects and modulation of Th1 inflammatory/immune responses. Ischemia and reperfusion lead to generation of high NO levels that contribute to irreversible tissue damage. Ischemia and reperfusion, as well as their in vitro simulation by hypoxia and reoxygenation, induce the expression of iNOS in macrophages. However, the molecular regulation of iNOS expression and activity in hypoxia and reoxygenation has hardly been studied. We show in this study that IFN-γ induced iNOS protein expression (by 50-fold from control, p < 0.01) and nitrite accumulation (71.6 ± 14 μM, p < 0.01 relative to control), and that hypoxia inhibited NO production (7.6 ± 1.7 μM, p < 0.01) without altering iNOS protein expression. Only prolonged reoxygenation restored NO production, thus ruling out the possibility that lack of oxygen, as a substrate, was the cause of hypoxia-induced iNOS inactivation. Hypoxia did not change the ratio between iNOS monomers and dimers, which are essential for iNOS activity, but the dimers were unable to produce NO, despite the exogenous addition of all cofactors and oxygen. Using immunoprecipitation, mass spectroscopy, and confocal microscopy, we demonstrated in normoxia, but not in hypoxia, an interaction between iNOS and α-actinin 4, an adapter protein that anchors enzymes to the actin cytoskeleton. Furthermore, hypoxia caused displacement of iNOS from the submembranal zones. We suggest that the intracellular localization and interactions of iNOS with the cytoskeleton are crucial for its activity, and that hypoxia inactivates iNOS by disrupting these interactions.
Role of Milk Secretion in Transport of Prolactin from Blood into Milk

In a first experiment prolactin was shown to be uniformly distributed in the milk of dairy cows. Accumulation of prolactin in milk increased with milking interval although milk prolactin content was proportionally greater after 2 h than accumulation of milk. Concentration of milk prolactin and total transfer of prolactin into milk was greater in mammary glands of cows milked just prior to initiation of intravenous infusion of exogenous prolactin. Similarly, inhibition of milk secretion as induced by intramammary infusion of colchicine, markedly reduced milk prolactin concentration and total transfer of prolactin into milk 5h following start of intravenous infusion of exogenous prolactin. Data indicate that transfer of prolactin from blood into milk during established lactation occurs primarily in conjunction with milk secretion.
A Practical Synthesis of Dynamic Role Settings in Telecare Services

Role provisioning is an essential yet complex aspect of the design of virtual organisations. This paper addresses an even more complex scenario, that of role provisioning in telecare. Here the roles may be doctor, nurse, carer, etc. And they must be enabled to participate in monitoring remote care-receivers via the Internet, using their professional expertise and skills, with access to online-resources. We show that the complexity of role provisioning is attributable not only to defining a role or roles within an organisation, but also to a large degree of uncertainty on how to manage online-contexts. We illustrate this by giving practical scenarios including services in on/offline mode, patient participation, and professional participation with different care-levels. We call these online-contexts "dynamic role settings". This work describes an approach to establishing a dynamic channel of interaction between a care-provider (e.g. doctor), necessary resources, and a care-receiver (e.g. patient), so as to manage the care-receivers' needs and the care-providers' responsibilities.
Effects of exogenous proteases without or with carbohydrases on nutrient digestibility and disappearance of non-starch polysaccharides in broiler chickens

The objective of the current study was to evaluate the effect of a subtilisin protease, without or with inclusion of carbohydrases, on digestibility and retention of energy and protein, as well as the solubilization and disappearance of non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) from corn-soybean meal based diets fed to broiler chickens. Two hundred eighty-eight Ross 308 male broiler chickens were used for the experiment. On d 14, the birds were weighed and allocated to 6 treatments and 8 replicates per treatment with 6 birds per replicate. Treatments were: 1) corn-soybean meal based control diet; 2) control diet plus supplemental protease at 5,000 (P5000) protease units (PU)/kg); 3) control plus 10,000 PU/kg protease (P10000); or control plus an enzyme combination containing xylanase, amylase, and protease (XAP) added to achieve protease activity of: 4) 2,500 PU/kg (XAP2500); 5) 5,000 PU/kg (XAP5000); or 6) 10,000 PU/kg (XAP10000). The enzymes in XAP were combined at fixed ratios of 10:1:25 of xylanase:amylase:protease. Data were analyzed by ANOVA and specific orthogonal contrasts between treatments were performed. Addition of xylanase and amylase increased (P < 0.05) the ileal digestibility of protein by 4.2% and 2.1% at XAP5000 and XAP10000, respectively (relative to P5000 and P10000, respectively), exhibiting a plateau after the XAP5000 dose. Increment (P < 0.05) in AME due to protease was evident, particularly in P10000. At the ileal level, XAP reduced (P < 0.05) the flow of insoluble xylose and arabinose, which indicates an increase in the solubilization of arabinoxylan polymers in the small intestine. Protease on its own reduced (P < 0.05) the flow of insoluble arabinose but did not affect the flow of insoluble xylose. XAP reduced (P < 0.05) the pre-cecal flow of insoluble and total glucose and galactose. It was concluded that whereas protease by itself improved nutrient utilization and increased solubilization of NSP components, at the lower dose, a combination of xylanase, amylase, and protease produced effects greater than those of protease alone.
Silencing the SpMPK1, SpMPK2, and SpMPK3 Genes in Tomato Reduces Abscisic Acid—Mediated Drought Tolerance

Drought is a major threat to agriculture production worldwide. Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) play a pivotal role in sensing and converting stress signals into appropriate responses so that plants can adapt and survive. To examine the function of MAPKs in the drought tolerance of tomato plants, we silenced the SpMPK1, SpMPK2, and SpMPK3 genes in wild-type plants using the virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) method. The results indicate that silencing the individual genes or co-silencing SpMPK1, SpMPK2, and SpMPK3 reduced the drought tolerance of tomato plants by varying degrees. Co-silencing SpMPK1 and SpMPK2 impaired abscisic acid (ABA)-induced and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-induced stomatal closure and enhanced ABA-induced H2O2 production. Similar results were observed when silencing SpMPK3 alone, but not when SpMPK1 and SpMPK2 were individually silenced. These data suggest that the functions of SpMPK1 and SpMPK2 are redundant, and they overlap with that of SpMPK3 in drought stress signaling pathways. In addition, we found that SpMPK3 may regulate H2O2 levels by mediating the expression of CAT1. Hence, SpMPK1, SpMPK2, and SpMPK3 may play crucial roles in enhancing tomato plants’ drought tolerance by influencing stomatal activity and H2O2 production via the ABA-H2O2 pathway.
Aligning Software Maintenance to the Offshore Reality

With an ever-increasing amount of software in place, the importance and ubiquity of software maintenance is continuously growing. Another more recent trend is to "offshore" such work to low-wage countries with still untapped engineering resources. However, software maintenance typically requires intensive customer contact, short iteration cycles, and fast response times which is counter to the communication delays, requirements misinterpretations and indirect responsibilities often found in offshore cooperations. This paper reports on a software maintenance project in the power plant engineering sector. From the outset, the project included, in line with corporate policy, heavy offshore involvement. This 'offshore reality' confronted the stakeholders with various problems, including lack of quality, slipped deadlines, and communication overhead. A number of measures were introduced to mitigate the problems. Finally, a project setup could be found satisfying both the characteristics of software maintenance projects and the peculiarities of offshore cooperations. In the paper, we describe and analyze the course of this project, and present a list of lessons learned and best practices for this uncommon, yet increasingly important project setup.
Slow resonance ratio control for vibration suppression and disturbance rejection in torsional system

In the resonance ratio control, which the authors proposed for vibration suppression and disturbance rejection in a torsional system, the estimation speed of the disturbance observer should have been much faster than the resonance frequency of the controlled system. However, too fast a disturbance observer sometimes causes an implementation problem. In this paper, the authors give the optimal speed of the disturbance observer and propose a novel technique named "slow resonance ratio control". It does not have any fast part in the controller. It also enables us to design the speed control and the vibration suppression control almost completely independently.
Maternal separation is associated with strain-specific responses to stress and epigenetic alterations to Nr3c1, Avp, and Nr4a1 in mouse

Stressful events early in life have been widely linked to behavioral phenotypes and have been implicated in the development of psychiatric disorders. Using a maternal separation paradigm, we investigated phenotypic and epigenetic changes following early life stress in two inbred strains of mice, C57BL/6J and DBA/2J. We found an increase in the corticosterone response to stress in male, C57BL/6J mice that had undergone maternal separation compared to controls. In addition, early life stress induced a number of mild but significant behavioral changes, many of which were sex and strain dependent. Following maternal separation anxiety was decreased in males but increased in DBA/2J females, DBA/2J males displayed reduced exploration of a novel object, and baseline activity was altered in males of both strains. Finally, we examined DNA methylation levels in the hippocampus across promoter regions of Nr3c1, Avp, and Nr4a1, and found altered levels at several CpG sites in maternally separated male mice compared to controls. This study contributes to a growing body of recent literature suggesting that epigenetic changes may mediate the impact of early life stress on behavior. In particular, we establish that the phenotypic and epigenetic responses to an adverse environment differ as a function of genetic background.
An Exploratory Study of Teachers' Uses of Data to Understand Students' Cognitive and Affective Engagement

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu. Recommended Citation Van Gasse, Nicole, "An Exploratory Study of Teachers' Uses of Data to Understand Students' Cognitive and Affective Engagement" (2014). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 2097.
Synthetic Aperture Radar Ship Detection Using Haar-Like Features

The detection of ships at sea is a complex task made more so by adverse weather conditions, lack of night visibility, and large areas of concern. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery with large swaths can provide the needed coverage at a reduced resolution. The development of ship detection methods that can effectively detect ships despite the reduced image resolution is an important area of research. A novel ship detection method is introduced that makes use of a standard constant false alarm rate (FAR) prescreening step followed by a cascade classifier ship discriminator. Ships are identified using Haar-like features using adaptive boosting training on the classifier with an accuracy of 89.38% and FAR of $1.47 \times 10^{-8}$ across a large swath Sentinel-1 and RADARSAT-2 newly created SAR data set.
Numerical Study of Geometric Multigrid Methods on CPU--GPU Heterogeneous Computers

The geometric multigrid method (GMG) is one of the most efficient solving techniques for discrete algebraic systems arising from elliptic partial differential equations. GMG utilizes a hierarchy of grids or discretizations and reduces the error at a number of frequencies simultaneously. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have recently burst onto the scientific computing scene as a technology that has yielded substantial performance and energy-efficiency improvements. A central challenge in implementing GMG on GPUs, though, is that computational work on coarse levels cannot fully utilize the capacity of a GPU. In this work, we perform numerical studies of GMG on CPU--GPU heterogeneous computers. Furthermore, we compare our implementation with an efficient CPU implementation of GMG and with the most popular fast Poisson solver, Fast Fourier Transform, in the cuFFT library developed by NVIDIA.
How do individuals cope with stress? Behavioural, physiological and neuronal differences between proactive and reactive coping styles in fish

ABSTRACT Despite the use of fish models to study human mental disorders and dysfunctions, knowledge of regional telencephalic responses in non-mammalian vertebrates expressing alternative stress coping styles is poor. As perception of salient stimuli associated with stress coping in mammals is mainly under forebrain limbic control, we tested region-specific forebrain neural (i.e. mRNA abundance and monoamine neurochemistry) and endocrine responses under basal and acute stress conditions for previously characterised proactive and reactive Atlantic salmon. Reactive fish showed a higher degree of the neurogenesis marker proliferating cell nuclear antigen (pcna) and dopamine activity under basal conditions in the proposed hippocampus homologue (Dl) and higher post-stress plasma cortisol levels. Proactive fish displayed higher post-stress serotonergic signalling (i.e. higher serotonergic activity and expression of the 5-HT1A receptor) in the proposed amygdala homologue (Dm), increased expression of the neuroplasticity marker brain-derived neurotropic factor (bdnf) in both Dl and the lateral septum homologue (Vv), as well as increased expression of the corticotropin releasing factor 1 (crf1) receptor in the Dl, in line with active coping neuro-profiles reported in the mammalian literature. We present novel evidence of proposed functional equivalences in the fish forebrain with mammalian limbic structures. Summary: Fish characterised with opposite coping styles show telencephalic region-specific differences associated with their behavioural responses to stimuli.