Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Age dependent variation of cerebral perfusion assessed by magnetic resonance continuous arterial spin labeling technique

Arterial spin labeling is a MR technique for the measurement of perfusion that exploits as diffusible tracer the arterial blood water spins. Since ASL technique provides a completely non-invasive way to measure quantitatively cerebral perfusion, it may be especially suitable for pediatric studies, related to perfusion alterations. The aim of this work is to study the behavior of cerebral perfusion changes with age and to measure values of normal perfusion early in life. In fact, the determination of changing perfusion patterns accompanying normal brain development is a necessary prelude to evaluate perfusion in child diseases. Our results show a considerable gap, rather than a gradual decrease, in cerebral perfusion between children and adult subjects, especially in the gray matter, and agree with others studies conducted with different imaging techniques. One can hypothesize that this significant discontinuity should be the expression of the passage from juvenile to adult age. ASL technique seems to be a feasible method for perfusion measurement and demonstrate its sensibility also in detecting the neurophysiological changes occurring during brain maturation.
Issues in AUV design and deployment for oceanographic research

We look at some of the important requirements for making autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) more ubiquitous in their role in oceanographic research in the deep ocean. We show how some of the constraints in working underwater lead to unique solutions for complex multidimensional sets of design possibilities for working with real vehicles in the deep ocean. We identify three components in elaborating on our system optimization concepts-the use of power, sensing strategies, and navigation. We analyse several possible deployments from a theoretical and practical standpoint in which the effects of each of these components interact. We look at the tasks associated with long distance transits, with conducting a sonar survey as well as the task associated with navigating multiple vehicles in the same acoustic network.
A new species of Stephanostomum Looss, 1899 (Digenea, Acanthocolpidae) with a bizarre oral sucker: S. adlardi sp. nov. from the common coral trout Plectropomus leopardus (Lacepède, 1802) (Perciformes, Serranidae) from Lizard Island, Great Barrier Reef

A new species of Acanthocolpidae, Stephanostomum adlardi is described from the serranid Plectropomus leopardus from Lizard Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef. It differs from all previously described acanthocolpids in the structure of the oral sucker which is extended into dorsal and ventral lobes each bearing a row of spines. A phylogenetic tree estimated from combined nuclear small and partial large ribosomal RNA gene sequences shows that, despite the unusual oral sucker structure, the species is a true member of the genus Stephanostomum. The molecular results also suggest that Monostephanostomum nolani is derived from within Stephanostomum.
Magnesium transport in Salmonella typhimurium: mgtA encodes a P-type ATPase and is regulated by Mg2+ in a manner similar to that of the mgtB P-type ATPase

Salmonella typhimurium has three distinct Mg2+ transport systems: CorA, MgtA, and MgtB, each encoded by its respective gene. corA and mgtB have been previously sequenced and characterized. This report details the sequence and properties of mgtA. Like mgtB, mgtA encodes a P-type ATPase. The mgtA gene encodes a slightly smaller protein than does mgtB, with a predicted molecular mass of about 95 kDa, running at 91 kDa on protein gels, which compares with values of 101 and 102 kDa, respectively, for the MgtB protein. The deduced amino acid sequence of MgtA is only 50% identical to that of MgtB, with a further 25% conservative amino acid substitutions, surprisingly low for such otherwise functionally similar proteins from the same organism. Codon usage for each gene is normal for S. typhimurium, however, indicating that neither gene is the result of a recent acquisition from another organism. A single open reading frame at mgtA encodes MgtA, in contrast to mgtB, which is shown to be an operon encoding (5' to 3') the 22.5-kDa MgtC and the MgtB proteins. Genetic constructs were used to show that deletion of MgtC does not alter the expression or transport properties of MgtB, making the role of the companion MgtC protein unclear. (The S. typhimurium homolog of treR, which encodes a putative repressor for trehalose uptake, is encoded by a gene adjacent to mgtA, and its sequence is also reported. Finally, exteremely strong Mg(2+) regulation of the mgtA and mgtB promoters but not of the corA or treR promoters was demonstrated by cloning the appropriate DNA sequences with luxAB and measuring enhancement of light production as a function of extracellular Mg(2+) concentration. Lowering the extracellular Mg(2+) concentration from 10 mM to 1 or 10 microM elicited a transcriptional response of several thousandfold from both the mgtA and mgtB promoters.
Research of large-scale offline map management in visual SLAM

This paper presents a novel method of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which is a method of real-time localization and mapping. It is important for a mobile robot to build a map while autonomously navigation. Due to the complexity of the robot work scene, the SLAM method proposed in this paper optimizes map management. It will cost a lot of time and space when a robot long-term works in a same large scene. Therefore, we propose a method in this paper to save a detail map as an offline map in advance. At the same time in order to facilitate the follow-up optimization, the offline map can be divided into several sub-graphs according to the similarity of the scene. Since the segmented offline map has been saved to local system, it can be loaded at any time to localization and obtain the pose of current frame.
Deletion of the DNA Ligase IV Gene in Candida glabrata Significantly Increases Gene-Targeting Efficiency

ABSTRACT Candida glabrata is reported as the second most prevalent human opportunistic fungal pathogen in the United States. Over the last decades, its incidence increased, whereas that of Candida albicans decreased slightly. One of the main reasons for this shift is attributed to the inherent tolerance of C. glabrata toward the commonly used azole antifungal drugs. Despite a close phylogenetic distance to Saccharomyces cerevisiae, homologous recombination works with poor efficiency in C. glabrata compared to baker's yeast, in fact limiting targeted genetic alterations of the pathogen's genome. It has been shown that nonhomologous DNA end joining is dominant over specific gene targeting in C. glabrata. To improve the homologous recombination efficiency, we have generated a strain in which the LIG4 gene has been deleted, which resulted in a significant increase in correct gene targeting. The very specific function of Lig4 in mediating nonhomologous end joining is the reason for the absence of clear side effects, some of which affect the ku80 mutant, another mutant with reduced nonhomologous end joining. We also generated a LIG4 reintegration cassette. Our results show that the lig4 mutant strain may be a valuable tool for the C. glabrata research community.
Conservation of immune responses to proteins isolated by preparative polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis from the outer membrane of nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae

Outer membrane proteins P2, P4, and P6 and two with molecular masses of 26 and 28 kDa have been purified from a strain of nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae by a preparative form of polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). Outer membrane protein P6, with a molecular mass of 16 kDa (determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate [SDS]-PAGE) was purified by both native PAGE and SDS-PAGE from three strains of nontypeable H. influenzae and one strain of type b H. influenzae. The same conditions were required for purification from each strain. The suitability of proteins isolated by these methods was assessed by studying the immune response of rats immunized with P6 in incomplete Freund's adjuvant into the Peyer's patches. P6 purified by either native PAGE or SDS-PAGE did not differ significantly from P6 purified by gel filtration and anion-exchange chromatography in the ability to enhance pulmonary clearance of live bacteria. This study also investigated the effects of SDS on P2 immunological responses in vivo and the effects of the reagents Zwittergent and sodium lauryl sarcosinate on outer membrane protein lymphocyte-proliferative responses in vitro. It was found that the presence of SDS in the immunization emulsion enhanced the antigen-specific cell-mediated response but suppressed the antigen-specific antibody responses. The presence of residual traces of Zwittergent in an outer membrane protein preparation inhibited antigen-specific cell-mediated proliferation, whereas extraction of outer membrane proteins with sodium lauryl sarcosinate did not inhibit antigen-specific proliferation. These results demonstrate that preparative PAGE is a suitable method for the purification of proteins from the outer membrane of H. influenzae required for investigation of their immunological significance as vaccine candidates and that traces of reagents used during protein purification may play an important role in determining the success of in vivo and in vitro studies.
El mercado de trabajo bajo el nuevo régimen económico en Argentina

El documento analiza los efectos del proceso de estabilizacion y reforma estructural de los anos noventa sobre el comportamiento del empleo y las remuneraciones. El mercado de trabajo, que fue sujeto de adecuaciones en su marco institucional acordes con las encaradas en otras areas, no acompano el exito que el pais registro en cuanto a estabilidad y crecimiento. El escaso impacto de la expansion de la produccion sobre la ocupacion que se observo entre 1991 y 1995 contribuyo a elevar el desempleo -que alcanzo valores ineditos para el pais—y se constituyo en la principal preocupacion economica. La baja elasticidad empleo-producto obedecio al mejor aprovechamiento de la capacidad instalada ociosa y de la mano de obra ocupada en la produccion pero, principalmente, al impacto de la reestructuracion productiva derivada de la apertura, la desregulacion y las privatizaciones asi como de la reanimacion de la inversion y de la apreciacion cambiaria. Tales factores provocaron la sustitucion de trabajo por capital e insumos importados asi como la elevacion de la productividad conjunta de los factores. El hecho que la lenta evolucion del empleo formal no derivase en un crecimiento compensador del sector informal y que sus efectos recayesen sobre el desempleo abierto es una caracteristica llamativa del periodo.Debido a que durante el periodo analizado operaron los efectos del proceso de reconversion y de los episodios ciclicos, resulta dificultoso desentranar cuales son las caracteristicas tipicas del mercado de trabajo del regimen economico que va emergiendo. Sin embargo, la elevada importancia de la precariedad ocupacional y, por tanto, la mayor volatilidad del empleo total aparecen como rasgos caracteristicos del mismo. El grado de respuesta de la ocupacion a los cambios del producto constituye, por el contrario, una variable mas dificil de pronosticar. No es razonable suponer que primara aquella muy baja de los primeros anos de la convertibilidad cuando el proceso de reconversion productiva ejercia sus efectos plenamente. Pero tampoco es convincente la idea del mantenimiento de los muy altos valores de la elasticidad de 1996 a 1998, periodo durante el cual la recuperacion economica fue acompanada de una significativa creacion de puestos de trabajo. Existe, sin embargo, consenso acerca de que la disminucion de la desocupacion abierta -que hacia fines del periodo analizado aun superaba el 12%-- y otras manifestaciones de la subocupacion solo podra lograrse si prevalecen elevadas y sostenidas tasas de crecimiento del producto. Tal escenario resulta tambien necesario para quebrar la tendencia al estancamiento -y aun a la leve reduccion— de las remuneraciones.
Sequencing of Single Pollen Nuclei Reveals Meiotic Recombination Events at Megabase Resolution and Circumvents Segregation Distortion Caused by Postmeiotic Processes

Meiotic recombination is a fundamental mechanism to generate novel allelic combinations which can be harnessed by breeders to achieve crop improvement. The recombination landscape of many crop species, including the major crop barley, is characterized by a dearth of recombination in 65% of the genome. In addition, segregation distortion caused by selection on genetically linked loci is a frequent and undesirable phenomenon in double haploid populations which hampers genetic mapping and breeding. Here, we present an approach to directly investigate recombination at the DNA sequence level by combining flow-sorting of haploid pollen nuclei of barley with single-cell genome sequencing. We confirm the skewed distribution of recombination events toward distal chromosomal regions at megabase resolution and show that segregation distortion is almost absent if directly measured in pollen. Furthermore, we show a bimodal distribution of inter-crossover distances, which supports the existence of two classes of crossovers which are sensitive or less sensitive to physical interference. We conclude that single pollen nuclei sequencing is an approach capable of revealing recombination patterns in the absence of segregation distortion.
Evaluating the socio-economic impact of Geographic Information: A classification of the literature

Geographic information (GI) is increasingly important to citizens, businesses and governments in modern societies. Considerable effort has been devoted to developing our understanding how GI affects the information management strategies and practices of individual organizations (GITA, 2006). However, there is an increasing awareness across public and private organizations that more attention has to be paid to assessing the broader economic and socio-economic impacts of GI technologies (European Commission, 2006; Craglia and Nowak, 2006). Given the investments that local, regional, national and supra-national organizations have made in GI and may consider for the future, it is imperative that the return on investments in GI be assessed across all scales. This is particularly relevant as GI is viewed increasingly as an infrastructural element for which investments and benefits must be justified and quantified (Grus, 2007). Although an increasing number of researchers are examining different approaches to evaluating specific GI applications, it is clear that the documentation of business cases and assessment strategies for GI investments is still incomplete (GITA, 2006). The key objective of this paper is to summarize and synthesize some of the current literature related to assessing the value of GI. This review, which was conducted under the auspices of the EcoGeo II project (http://ecogeo.scg.ulaval.ca), is based on an examination of 44 academic, business and government studies. A classification framework was constructed to compare these studies with reference to two key variables: topics and approaches. The studies we analyzed were developed within different public and private organizations and spanned international, national and regional scales. To make the study manageable, we focused particularly on the regional context represented by Canada’s province of Quebec. The results show that the topic of assessing the impacts of GI remains largely embryonic in nature. In particular, we identify the lack of a common vocabulary, no shared understanding concerning exactly which topics should be assessed, a lack of testing for any approaches suggested for evaluation, and often a dearth of concrete answers.
Age- and sex-related differences in use of guideline-recommended care and mortality among patients with incident heart failure in Denmark.

BACKGROUND data are sparse on age- and sex-related differences in use of guideline-recommended care and subsequent mortality among patients with heart failure (HF). METHODS we identified 24,308 incident patients with a verified primary diagnosis of HF recorded during 2003-2010 in the Danish Heart Failure Registry. The registry monitors guideline-recommended processes of care: echocardiography, New York Heart Association Classification, treatment with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors/angiotensin II receptor blockers, betablockers, physical training and patient education. RESULTS older age was associated with lower use of recommended processes of care. Relative risk (RR) for receiving processes of care varied for men >80 years from 0.52 to 0.91 compared with men ≤65 years. Corresponding RRs among women >80 years varied from 0.55 to 0.89 compared with women ≤65 years. Older age was as expected associated with higher 1 year mortality (32.6% among men >80 years versus 5.4% among men ≤65 years and 33.8% among women >80 years versus 6.6% among women ≤65 years). The corresponding hazard ratios (HRs) were 4.54 (95% CI 3.93-5.25) and 4.08 (95% CI 3.51-4.75) for the oldest versus youngest men and women, after adjustment for patient characteristics. Adjustment for differences in care lowered HRs among the oldest age groups (adjusted HR 3.87 for men and 3.48 for women, respectively). The findings were also confirmed when stratifying the patients according to left ventricular ejection fraction ≤40% and >40%. CONCLUSION older patients with HF were less likely to receive guideline-recommended processes of care, irrespective of sex. Lower level of care may contribute to an excess mortality observed among the older patients.
A faster genetic algorithm for substation location and network design of power distribution systems

In this paper, a genetic algorithm is employed to plan the medium and long term expansion of electric power distribution systems. The expansion planning task is modeled as a single-objective optimization problem in which the objective function is the monetary cost of the network. A new procedure is proposed to perform substation location jointly with network topology design. Such a procedure is performed during function evaluation, and it requires low computational cost. Results for a real eight bus energy system are presented. These results show that reasonable solutions can be reached in a computational time considerably lower than the one required by former methods.
Metadata Extraction System for Chinese Books

Extracting metadata from academic papers has attracted much attention from researchers in past years. But how to extract metadata automatically from books is still seldom discussed. In this paper, we address this task on Chinese books and present a system to extract metadata from the title page of a book. This system consists of three components: metadata segmentation, metadata labeling, and post-processing. Different strategies are adopted in the system to identify different metadata types, and a variety of information sources, including geometric layout, linguistic, semantic content and header-footer, are used to accommodate the wide range of metadata layouts. Experimental results on real-world data have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Deconstructing Speech: new tools for speech manipulation

My research at the London College of Communication is concerned with archives of recorded speech, what new tools need to be devised for its manipulation and how to go about this process of invention. Research into available forms of analysis of speech is discussed below with regard to two specific areas, feature vectors from linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis and hidden Markov-model-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These are discussed in order to demonstrate that whilst aspects of each may be useful in devising a system of speech-archive manipulation for artistic use. Their drawbacks and deficiencies for use in art – consequent of the reasons for their invention – necessitate the creation of tools with artistic, rather than engineering agendas in mind. It is through the initial process of devising conceptual tools for understanding speech as sound objects that I have been confronted with issues of semiotics and semantics of the voice and of the relationship between sound and meaning in speech, and of the role of analysis in mediating existing methods of communication. This is discussed with reference to Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music (Nattiez 1987). The ‘trace’ – a neutral level of semiotic analysis proposed by Nattiez, far from being hypothetical as suggested by Hatten (1992: 88–98) and others, is present by analogy to many forms of mediation in modern spoken communication and the reproduction of music, and it is precisely this neutrality with regards to meaning that tools for manipulation of speech must possess, since the relationships between the sound of speech and its meaning are ‘intense’ (after Deleuze 1968).
Imaging microscopic distribution of antifungal agents in dandruff treatments with stimulated Raman scattering microscopy

Abstract. Treatment of dandruff condition usually involves use of antidandruff shampoos containing antifungal agents. Different antifungal agents show variable clinical efficacy based on their cutaneous distribution and bioavailability. Using stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), we mapped the distribution of unlabeled low-molecular weight antifungal compounds zinc pyrithione (ZnPT) and climbazole (CBZ) on the surface of intact porcine skin with cellular precision. SRS has sufficient chemical selectivity and sensitivity to detect the agents on the skin surface based on their unique chemical motifs that do not occur naturally in biological tissues. Moreover, SRS is able to correlate the distribution of the agents with the morphological features of the skin using the CH2 stretch mode, which is abundant in skin lipids. This is a significant strength of the technique since it allows the microscopic accumulation of the agents to be correlated with physiological features and their chemical environment without the use of counter stains. Our findings show that due to its lower solubility, ZnPT coats the surface of the skin with a sparse layer of crystals in the size range of 1 to 4 μm. This is consistent with the current understanding of the mode of action of ZnPT. In contrast, CBZ being more soluble and hydrophobic resulted in diffuse homogeneous distribution. It predominantly resided in microscopic lipid-rich crevasses and penetrated up to 60 μm into the infundibular spaces surrounding the hair shaft. The ability of the SRS to selectively map the distribution of agents on the skin’s surface has the potential to provide insight into the mechanisms underpinning the topical application of antifungal or skin-active agents that could lead to the rational engineering of enhanced formulations.