Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Persistent cAMP signaling by internalized TSH receptors occurs in thyroid but not in HEK293 cells

G‐protein‐coupled receptors (GPCRs) have long been believed to activate G proteins only on the cell surface. However, we have recently shown that, in thyroid cells, the GPCR for the thyroid‐stimulating hormone (TSH) can continue stimulating cAMP production after cointernalization with TSH. cAMP signaling by internalized TSH receptors (TSHRs) was persistent, whereas that by cell‐surface TSHRs was apparently transient, but the reasons for the transient signaling by cell‐surface TSHRs were not investigated. Here, we developed and used fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)‐based methods to precisely compare the kinetics of TSH binding and dissociation from cell‐surface TSHRs with those of the subsequent termination of cAMP signaling directly in living cells. Our results indicate that both TSH binding to human TSHRs expressed in a human embryonic kidney cell line (HEK 293) and the ensuing cAMP signals are rapidly and fully reversible (t1/2,off=2.96±1.04 and 2.70±0.73 min, respectively). The FRET measurement of TSH binding was specific, as shown by the lack of a detectable interaction between TSH and the β2‐adrenergic receptor expressed in control cells. Enhancing TSHR internalization by β‐arrestin 2 overexpression did not modify the reversibility of TSHR‐cAMP signaling. These findings strengthen the view that the cointernalization of TSH‐TSHR complexes to a signaling compartment present in thyroid, but not in HEK 293 cells, is responsible for persistent cAMP signaling. —Werthmann, R. C. , Volpe, S. , Lohse, M. J., Calebiro, D. Persistent cAMP signaling by internalized TSH receptors occurs in thyroid but not in HEK293 cells. FASEB J. 26, 2043‐2048 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Progress and Trends in Ink-jet Printing Technology

This paper provides a brief review of the various paths undertaken in the development of ink-jet printing. Highlights of recent progress and trends in this technology are discussed. The technologies embedded in the latest ink-jet products from current industry leaders in both thermal and piezoelectric drop-on-demand ink-jet methods are also described. Finally, this article presents a list of the potential ink-jet technology applications that have emerged in the past few years.
Scalable Image Search with Multiple Index Tables

Motivated by scalable partial-duplicate visual search, there has been growing interest in a wealth of compact and efficient binary feature descriptors (e.g. ORB, FREAK, BRISK). Typically, binary descriptors are clustered into codewords and quantized with Hamming distance, following the conventional bag-of-words strategy. However, such codewords formulated in Hamming space do not present obvious indexing and search performance improvement as compared to the Euclidean codewords. In this paper, without explicit codeword construction, we explore the use of partial binary descriptors as direct codebook indices (addresses). We propose a novel approach to build multiple index tables which concurrently check for collision of the same hash values. The evaluation is performed on two public image datasets: DupImage and Holidays. The experimental results demonstrate the indexing efficiency and retrieval accuracy of our approach.
Cave wall to internet, storytelling, the ancient learning art

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show the value of storytelling in developing organisational culture and values, facilitating change and accelerating learning. Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks at why storytelling is important and how it has survived and adapted to changing technologies. Findings – Storytelling is crucial in bridging the knowledge/action gap that is at the centre of most management, change and learning problems. The fact that oral storytelling has survived so many changes in technology is testament to its value but more recent research has underlined the scientific reasons for its success. Originality/value – A story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own ideas and experience. In terms of influencing there is nothing more powerful than people thinking that the idea is their own. When people believe the idea is their own they put all their energies behind implementing it thus reinforcing culture/values and facilitating learning and change.
Data-Driven Modeling, Control and Tools for Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Demand response (DR) is becoming important as the volatility on the grid continues to increase. Current DR approaches are either completely manual or involve deriving first principles based models which are extremely cost and time prohibitive to build. We consider the problem of data-driven DR for large buildings which involves predicting the demand response baseline, evaluating fixed DR strategies and synthesizing DR control actions. We provide a model based control with regression trees algorithm (mbCRT), which allows us to perform closed-loop control for DR strategy synthesis for large buildings. Our data-driven control synthesis algorithm outperforms rule- based DR by 17% for a large DoE commercial reference building and leads to a curtailment of 380 kW and over $45,000 in savings. Our methods have been integrated into an open source tool called DR-Advisor, which acts as a recommender system for the building's facilities manager and provides suitable control actions to meet the desired load curtailment while maintaining operations and maximizing the economic reward. DR-Advisor achieves 92.8% to 98.9% prediction accuracy for 8 buildings on Penn's campus. We compare DR-Advisor with other data driven methods and rank 2nd on ASHRAE's benchmarking data-set for energy prediction.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Sri Lankan University Students as a Consequence of Their Exposure to Family Violence

The article presents the results of a study on the association between exposure to family violence (i.e., witnessing interparental violence and experiencing parental violence) during childhood and adolescence and adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study was conducted among a self-selected convenience sample of 476 students from Sri Lanka, using a self-administered questionnaire. The findings indicate that the more participants witnessed interparental violence and the more they experienced parental violence, the more they exhibited PTSD symptoms. Moreover, the findings reveal that participants’ exposure to family violence explains a significant amount of the variance in their PTSD over and above the variance that can be attributed to their sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, number of siblings, and family’s socioeconomic status) and to their perceptions of the environment and functioning of their families. The limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed.
Evolutionary Computing Based Multilevel H-bridge Cascaded Inverter with Photovoltaic System

In recent years, the increase of energy demand and the problems of fossil-fuel sources due to their environmental pollution and future shortages, have led to the development of technologies need to use non-polluting alternative energy sources such as solar and wind sources. Growing demand, advancements in semiconductor technology and magnetic materials such as high frequency inductor cores, has a significant impact on PV inverter topologies and their efficiencies, on the improvement of the control circuits on the potential of costs reduction. The user naturally wants to operate the Photovoltaic (PV) array at its highest energy conversion output by continuously utilizing the maximum available solar power of the array. The electrical system PV modules are powered by solar arrays requires special design considerations due to varying nature of the solar power generated resulting from unpredictable and sudden changes in weather conditions which change the solar irradiation level as well as the cell operating temperature. This work proposes on Evolutionary computing Based Multilevel H-Bridge Cascaded Inverter for Photovoltaic System with simple PWM Technique, to have the advantages of low frequency switching and reduced total harmonic distortion (THD).
Toward Improving b-Coloring based Clustering using a Greedy re-Coloring Algorithm

Clustering is an important task in the process of data analysis which can be viewed as a data modeling technique that provides an attractive mechanism to automatically find the hidden structure of large data sets (Jain et al., 1999). Informally, this task consists of the division of data items (objects, instances, etc.) into groups or categories, such that all objects in the same group are similar to each other, while dissimilar from objects in the other groups. Clustering plays an important role in data mining applications such as Web analysis, information retrieval, medical diagnosis, and many other domains. Recently, we have proposed a clustering method based on the concept of b-coloring of a graph (Irving & Manlov, 1999). A graph b-coloring is an assignment of colors to the vertices of the graph such that: i. no two adjacent vertices (vertices joined by an weighted edge representing the dissimilarity between objects) have the same color (
Teaching Anger Management Skills to Students with Severe Emotional or Behavioral Disorders

A 10-session anger management program using a whole-class format was offered in a therapeutic day school for early adolescents with serious emotional or behavioral problems. Booster sessions to help students maintain achieved gains were integral to the program. Participants exhibited a reduction in peer fighting, an increase in talking things out with a counselor when angry, and an increase in using anger logs. At the 4-month follow-up, students who received booster sessions continued to make more use of the log than all of the other students. The researchers concluded that more students with difficulties were reached by this approach than small groups would have afforded. Students with such serious behavioral problems may need a program with more intensive staff support and fewer time restrictions to maintain behavioral gains.
The development of learning as the leading activity for Hong Kong immigrant families in Australia

Many parents work hard to foster a culture of learning early in their children’s development. The desire for children to learn as early as possible is common among Hong Kong–Australian families. These children continue to perform well academically. Little is known about the pedagogy that underpins such development in the family or on the appropriateness of this for children’s development. Through an intensive case study of three Hong Kong–Australian families investigating their family practices, it was found that learning as a leading activity can be established at an early age. Such findings problematise the expected norms and milestones for traditional maturational theories of child development, as well as raising questions about the specific aspects of leading activity and periodisation promoted by cultural–historical theorists. The findings also reveal the importance of cultural and temporal factors in the development of pedagogical approaches in families.
A Study on Classroom Spatial Performance: Its Impacts on Students’ Satisfaction and Study Achievement

The objective of this paper was to find out whether classroom spatial performance impact the satisfactorily of the students and their study achievement, using the case study of higher-degree students in department of architecture in one of Private University, located in inner-city of Jakarta (Indonesia). This study employed assesments on both physical and psychological conditions of classrooms and further have seen how these two classified conditions impact on satisfaction of students in using it. It was also to see how those conditions impact on students’ academic achievement other than satisfaction level. Using the Post Occupancy Evaluation, the research employed a process of interviews with the students as a classrooms’ users and observation to the spatial conditions as well. The study found out that each and both Physical and Psychological Conditions of classrooms simultanuosly have an influenced to students’ satisfaction as well as to their academic achievements. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n4s3p642
Efficient Extraction of Non-negative Latent Factors from High-Dimensional and Sparse Matrices in Industrial Applications

High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrices are commonly encountered in many big data-related industrial applications like recommender systems. When acquiring useful patterns from them, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) models have proven to be highly effective because of their fine representativeness of non-negative data. However, current NMF techniques suffer from a) inefficiency in addressing HiDS matrices, and b) constrained training schemes lack of flexibility, extensibility and adaptability. To address these issues, this work proposes to factorize industrial-size sparse matrices via a novel Inherently Non-negative Latent Factor (INLF) model. It connects the output factors and decision variables via a single-element-dependent sigmoid function, thereby innovatively removing the non-negativity constraints from its training process without impacting the solution accuracy. Hence, its training process is unconstrained, highly flexible and compatible with general learning schemes. Experimental results on five HiDS matrices generated by industrial applications indicate that INLF is able to acquire non-negative latent factors from them in a more efficient manner than any existing method does.
The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures

In this book, David Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music. A preference rule system evaluates many possible interpretations and chooses the one that best satisfies the rules.After an introductory chapter, Temperley presents preference rule systems for generating six basic kinds of musical structure: meter, phrase structure, contrapuntal structure, harmony, and key, as well as pitch spelling (the labeling of pitch events with spellings such as A flat or G sharp). He suggests that preference rule systems not only show how musical structures are inferred, but also shed light on other aspects of music. He substantiates this claim with discussions of musical ambiguity, retrospective revision, expectation, and music outside the Western canon (rock and traditional African music). He proposes a framework for the description of musical styles based on preference rule systems and explores the relevance of preference rule systems to higher-level aspects of music, such as musical schemata, narrative and drama, and musical tension.
Representações Sociais, Representações Individuais e Comportamento

This paper is a bibliographical review about social representations theory. Its objective is to present a global understanding about the theory and phenomenon of social representations, as well as the relationship given by individual and group in the theory, more specifically the relationships between social and individual representations and the relationships between social representations and behavior. Empirical studies and theoretical essays published in scientific international literature are taken as a basis. It is concluded that the theory has characteristics that make it close to a research paradigm and the relevance of investigating in depth the effects of interaction contexts with social objects and relationships between social and individual thinking is indicated.
A Conserved Upstream Open Reading Frame Mediates Sucrose-Induced Repression of Translation

Sugars have been shown to regulate transcription of numerous genes in plants. Sucrose controls translation of the group S basic region leucine zipper (bZIP)-type transcription factor ATB2/AtbZIP11 (Rook et al., 1998a). This control requires the unusually long 5′ untranslated region (UTR) of the gene. Point mutations and deletions of the 5′UTR have uncovered the sequences involved. A highly conserved upstream open reading frame (uORF) coding for 42 amino acids is essential for the repression mechanism. It is conserved in 5′UTRs of bZIP transcription factors from other Arabidopsis thaliana genes and many other plants. ATB2/AtbZIP11 is normally expressed in association with vascular tissues. Ectopic expression of a 5′UTR construct shows that the sucrose repression system is functional in all tissues. AtbZIP2 is another Arabidopsis bZIP transcription factor gene harboring the conserved uORF, which is regulated similarly via sucrose-induced repression of translation. This suggests a general function of the conserved uORF in sucrose-controlled regulation of expression. Our findings imply the operation of a sucrose-sensing pathway that controls translation of several plant bZIP transcription factor genes harboring the conserved uORF in their 5′UTRs. Target genes of such transcription factors will then be regulated in sucrose-dependent way.
Chemical Composition and Antimicrobial Activity of the Volatile Oil from Fusarium tricinctum, the Endophytic Fungus in Paris polyphylla var. yunnanensis

The volatile oil, obtained by hydrodistillation from Fusarium tricinctum, the endophytic fungus isolated from Paris polyphylla var. yunnanensis, was analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). trans-1,2,3,3a,4,7a-Hexahydro-7a-methyl-5H-inden-5-one (73.1%), 2-methylene-4,8,8-trimethyl-4-vinyl bicyclo [5.2. 0] nonane (12.0%), and 2,6-dimethyl-6-(4-methyl-3-pentenyl) bicyclo [3.1. 1] hept-2-ene (4.5%) were the major compounds of the 15 identified components accounting for 95.4% of the volatile oil. The antimicrobial activity of the volatile oil was assayed against eight bacteria and two fungi. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of the volatile oil against the test bacteria ranged from 25 to 45 μg/mL. The MIC values against the fungi Candida albicans and Magnaporthe oryzae were 100 and 225 μg/mL, respectively. The mean inhibitory concentration (IC50) values of the volatile oil against the test bacteria ranged from 17.8 to 31.6 μg/mL, and those of the volatile oil against C. albicans and M. oryzae were 84.3 and 204.3 μg/mL, respectively.
Preconditioning enhances the expression of mitochondrial antioxidant thioredoxin‐2 in the forebrain of rats exposed to severe hypobaric hypoxia

The impact of severe hypoxia and preconditioning on the expression of the mitochondrial antioxidant thioredoxin‐2 (Trx‐2) in rat hippocampus (CA1, CA2, CA3 fields, and dentate gyrus) and neocortex was studied by immunocytochemistry. The preconditioning consisted of three trials of mild hypobaric hypoxia (360 Torr, 2 hr) spaced at 24 hr. The last trial was followed by severe hypobaric hypoxia (180 Torr, 3 hr) 24 hr later. Both in hippocampus and in neocortex, severe hypobaric hypoxia resulted in enhanced Trx‐2 expression at 3 hr, followed by a slight decline in Trx‐2 levels, which nevertheless remained increased at 24 hr elsewhere except for the CA1 region. The preconditioning considerably augmented severe hypoxia‐induced Trx‐2 immunoreactivity, affecting both the number of immunoreactive cells and the intensity of immunostaining. The findings suggest a role for Trx‐2 in the formation of brain hypoxic/ischemic tolerance accomplished by the preconditioning. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A CMOS self-calibrating frequency synthesizer

A programmable phase-locked-loop (PLL)-based frequency synthesizer, capable of automatically adjusting the nominal center frequency of the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to an optimum value is described. In fully integrated PLLs, the VCO output frequency should be tunable over a wide range of frequencies, covering the desired range of the synthesizer output frequencies, for all processing variations and operating conditions. A wide tuning range realized by making the VCO gain K/sub o/ large has the unwanted effect of increasing the phase noise at the output of the VCO, and hence the PLL as well. In this work, the wide tuning range is realized by digital control, with process variability managed through self-calibration. The PLL is only required to pull the oscillator output frequency to account for the digital quantization, temperature variations, and some margin. This allows the K/sub o/ to be small, with better noise performance resulting. The prototype self-calibrating frequency synthesizer, capable of operating from 80 MHz to 1 GHz, demonstrates a measured absolute jitter of 20-ps rms at 480-MHz operating frequency. The prototype IC is fabricated in a 0.35-/spl mu/m 3-V digital CMOS process.
The Burden of Rhinitis and Rhinoconjunctivitis in Adolescents

Purpose Rhinitis and conjunctivitis are common diseases worldwide that are frequently associated. Nevertheless, the risk factors for rhinoconjunctivitis are not well-described and the impact of conjunctivitis on rhinitis and asthma in children remains unknown. This study explored the different risk factors and evaluated the burden of rhinoconjunctivitis among adolescents. Methods This was a cross-sectional study conducted on a random sample of schoolchildren, aged 10-17 years, using skin prick tests and a self-administered questionnaire on respiratory health investigating the impact of rhinitis and rhinoconjunctivitis on daily activities. Results A complete evaluation was obtained for 2,150 children. The prevalence of rhinitis alone was 18.2% and rhinitis associated with conjunctivitis was 20.5%. Rhinoconjunctivitis was more frequently associated with females, a parental history of atopy, domestic exposure to mold/dampness, passive smoke exposure, and reported truck traffic in residential streets. Moreover, rhinoconjunctivitis was associated with a higher level of allergic sensitization. The prevalence of current asthma was 1.7% in subjects without rhinitis or rhinoconjunctivitis, 5.1% in rhinitis and 10.7% in rhinoconjunctivitis. In a logistic model, rhinoconjunctivitis yielded a 2-fold risk for current asthma with respect to rhinitis. Subjects with rhinoconjunctivitis had poorer quality of life (QoL); there was an impact on daily activities in 4.6% of rhinitis and 10.7% of rhinoconjunctivitis. Conclusions Ocular symptoms increase the role of rhinitis as a risk factor for asthma and its impact on daily activities in children.
Oblivious Decision Trees and Abstract Cases

Abstract : In this paper, we address the problem of case-based learning in the presence of irrelevant features. We review previous work on attribute selection and present a new algorithm, OBLIVION, that carries out greedy pruning of oblivious decision trees, which effectively store a set of abstract cases in memory. We hypothesize that this approach will efficiently identify relevant features even when they interact, as in parity concepts. We report experimental results on artificial domains that support this hypothesis, and experiments with natural domains that show improvement in some cases but not others. In closing, we discuss the implications of our experiments, consider additional work on irrelevant features, and outline some directions for future research.