Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Mouse Model of Familial ALS Has Increased CNS Levels of Endogenous Ubiquinol9/10 and Does Not Benefit from Exogenous Administration of Ubiquinol10

Oxidative stress and mitochondrial impairment are the main pathogenic mechanisms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a severe neurodegenerative disease still lacking of effective therapy. Recently, the coenzyme-Q (CoQ) complex, a key component of mitochondrial function and redox-state modulator, has raised interest for ALS treatment. However, while the oxidized form ubiquinone10 was ineffective in ALS patients and modestly effective in mouse models of ALS, no evidence was reported on the effect of the reduced form ubiquinol10, which has better bioavailability and antioxidant properties. In this study we compared the effects of ubiquinone10 and a new stabilized formulation of ubiquinol10 on the disease course of SOD1G93A transgenic mice, an experimental model of fALS. Chronic treatments (800 mg/kg/day orally) started from the onset of disease until death, to mimic the clinical trials that only include patients with definite ALS symptoms. Although the plasma levels of CoQ10 were significantly increased by both treatments (from <0.20 to 3.0–3.4 µg/mL), no effect was found on the disease progression and survival of SOD1G93A mice. The levels of CoQ10 in the brain and spinal cord of ubiquinone10- or ubiquinol10-treated mice were only slightly higher (≤10%) than the endogenous levels in vehicle-treated mice, indicating poor CNS availability after oral dosing and possibly explaining the lack of pharmacological effects. To further examine this issue, we measured the oxidized and reduced forms of CoQ9/10 in the plasma, brain and spinal cord of symptomatic SOD1G93A mice, in comparison with age-matched SOD1WT. Levels of ubiquinol9/10, but not ubiquinone9/10, were significantly higher in the CNS, but not in plasma, of SOD1G93A mice, suggesting that CoQ redox system might participate in the mechanisms trying to counteract the pathology progression. Therefore, the very low increases of CoQ10 induced by oral treatments in CNS might be not sufficient to provide significant neuroprotection in SOD1G93A mice.
EXPLORING THE ROLE OF PROSODIC AWARENESS AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS IN WORD READING AND READING COMPREHENSION: A STUDY OF COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY IN ADULT READERS

ii DEDICATION . iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . viii LIST OF FIGURES . x CHAPTER ONE Introduction . 1 Purpose . 3 CHAPTER TWO . 6 Literature Review . 6 Flexible Cognition in Phonological Measures. 6 Prosodic Awareness . 7 Executive Functions. 9 Cognitive Control in the Developmental Lifespan. 11 EF and Academic Achievement. 12 EF and Reading Comprehension. 14 The Current Study.19 CHAPTER THREE . 23 Method . 23 Participants. 25 Instruments. 25 Control Measures. 25 Verbal Intelligence. 25 Nonverbal Intelligence. 26 Processing Speed . 27 Phonological Short-Term Memory. 28 Reading Measures. 28 Word Reading Ability. 28 Word Decoding. 30 Reading Comprehension. 31 Prosodic Awareness and Manipulation. 33
Quantitation of Chronic and Acute Treatment Effects on Neuronal Network Activity Using Image and Signal Analysis

Upon maturation, primary neuronal cultures form an interconnected network based on neurite outgrowth and synaptogenesis in which spontaneous electrical activity arises. Measurement of network activity allows quantification of neuronal health and maturation. A fluorescent indicator was used to monitor secondary calcium influxes after the occurrence of action potentials, allowing us to examine activity of hippocampal cultures via confocal live cell imaging. Subsequently, nuclear staining with DAPI allows accurate cell segmentation. To analyze the calcium recording in a robust, observer-independent manner, we implemented an automated image- and signal-processing algorithm and validated it against a visual, interactive procedure. Both methods yielded similar results on the emergence of synchronized activity and allowed robust quantitative measurement of acute and chronic modulation of drugs on network activity. Both the number of days in vitro (DIV) and neutralization of nerve growth factor (NGF) have a significant effect on synchronous burst frequency and correlation. Acute effects are demonstrated using 5-HT (serotonin) and ethylene glycol tetra-acetic acid. Automated analysis allowed measuring additional features, such as peak decay times and bursting frequency of individual neurons. Based on neuronal cell cultures in 96-well plates and accurate calcium recordings, the analysis method allows development of an integrated high-content screening assay. Because molecular biological techniques can be applied to assess the influence of genes on network activity, it is applicable for neurotoxicity or neurotrophics screening as well as development of in vitro disease models via, for example, pharmacologic manipulation or RNAi.
Stability of TCP-Like Congestion Control Algorithm

A delayed network congestion control algorithm is a complicated dynamical nonlinear feedback system. A class of delayed TCP congestion control algorithms, TCP Vegas congestion control schemes with general description, is analyzed. The delayed systems with discrete-time are discussed, and many criteria on the stability are obtained. Finally, the computer simulations show that the stability criteria are validity and practicability.
Impact de la fiscalité sur les décisions et modalités de financement des investissements, ainsi que sur la valeur de la firme : analyse comparative (France, Allemagne, Royaume Uni, Etats Unis et Tunisie)

L'objectif de cette recherche consiste a etudier dans quelle mesure l'imperfection du marche resultant de la fiscalite directe des societes et de l'imposition personnelle, dans des contextes financiers, comptables et fiscaux differents, affecte les decisions strategiques (investissement et financement) de la firme ainsi que sa valeur. Dans la premiere partie nous avons presente le cadre theorique de la relation entre la fiscalite et la decision d'investissement tout en mettant l'accent sur l'effet de la fiscalite directe des societes et de l'imposition personnelle sur la decision d'investissement dans le cadre de la theorie neoclassique et de celle de q de Tobin. Ensuite, nous avons developpe le cadre conceptuel qui englobe les theories fiscales et financieres portant sur le choix des modalites de financement des investissements et la valeur de la firme. Le cadre theorique fiscal s'inspire de l'hypothese de neutralite en absence de fiscalite, de l'hypothese d'integration de la fiscalite des societes, de l'hypothese d'integration de l'imposition personnelle et de l'hypothese de substitution de la dette, alors que les theories financieres developpees concernent la theorie d'arbitrage, la theorie d'agence, la theorie de la hierarchie des sources de financement ainsi que l'asymetrie d'information. Dans la deuxieme partie nous avons realise une etude empirique dans des contextes differents afin de mettre en evidence les repercussions de la fiscalite sur les decisions d'investissement, leurs modalites de financement et sur la valeur de la firme. En appliquant la methode des moments generalises sur des donnees de panel collectees pour la periode observee de 1997 jusqu'a 1999, trois modeles sont estimes utilisant des variables qui expliquent l'effet de l'impot sur la decision d'investissement, en actifs corporels, et le financement de ces investissements au sein de la firme ainsi que l'impact de ces deux decisions sur la valeur de la firme dans cinq pays dont chacun adopte un regime different d'imposition des societes et des individus a savoir la France, l'Allemagne, le Royaume Uni, les Etats Unis, et la Tunisie. Les resultats obtenus ont permis de repondre, en partie, a la problematique de recherche dans la mesure ou nous avons constate que certaines variables fiscales introduites dans les modeles estimes ont eu un impact, qui differe d'un contexte a un autre, sur le niveau d'investissement, les modalites de financement ainsi que sur la valeur de la firme.
Prioritizing Multiple, Contradictory Sources in Common-Sense Learning by Being Told; or, Advice-Take

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and speciic requests. After outside publication, requests should be lled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). Abstract An important common-sense capability is to learn by \taking advice", or \being told", from a variety of sources of information: messages from various other agents, reading various texts, etc. Such learned or \assimilated" knowledge provides an important basis for one's actions. Yet a basic feature of life is that one cannot believe everything that one is told. Not only may advice be incorrect; e.g., it may be contradicted by direct experience. Worse, diierent sources of advice information may contradict each other, or even themselves. How is an advice-taking agent to maintain a consistent, yet usefully actionable, set of beliefs, then? Here, we address this problem, which has not received much previous attention in the AI literature. We illustrate, with an actual example , how it arises in the domain of bureaucracy. A common human strategy is to treat advice as working belief, which can be overridden by other advice and direct experience. This suggests the rst element of our approach: to represent advice as default-status knowledge. A crucial issue in logically formalizing common-sense reasoning is then how to represent precedence among multiple, potentially contradictory sources of information. We observe that bases for such precedence include reliability and authority. We observe furthermore that precedence relationships may themselves be inferrable and even defeasible. We show how, for the rst time, to represent advice-taking, with such precedence among sources, as reasoning in a non-monotonic logical formalism. We employ a generalized variant of circumscription that we have recently developed: Defeasible Axiomatized Policy (DAP) circumscription. (See attached paper detailing DAP circum-scription.) Precedence among sources is represented explicitly via the mechanism of prioritization in DAP circumscription. DAP circumscription is the rst non-monotonic logical formalism to express defeasible prioritization-type precedence. Our approach to representation of precedence among sources has a number of advantages over other non-monotonic logical formalisms. It treats precedence more explicitly than all previous approaches except perhaps Lifschitz' 1988 …
Hypermedia as a Cognitive Tool.

This paper reports on a study that observed students creating structured hypertext documents, and how they try to convey structural information, in order to formulate tentative guidelines/principles for the design of concept mapping tools or hypertext systems with an emphasis on the representation of structural knowledge, and to formulated guidelines or principles for educational practice. Student use of hypertext and DarkStar, the hypertext authoring system used in the study, are described; concept mapping, structural information, and hypertext, and their effects on education, are discussed. A sample of 143 student-created documents were analyzed according to the structure of the whole document as it appeared on the Overview Map, as well as layout and screen design. Results indicated that: students predominantly used a hierarchical form of structuring information; students predominantly linked the same term occurring on two nodes of their document; students are acquainted with basic principles of screen design and use them to structure their documents; chunking and queuing information are popular with students; and pictures and graphics were rarely used. A figure illustrates the overview editor. Two tables present data on the distribution of hierarchical versus non-hierarchical links and organization of information on the screen. Contains 14 references. (DLS) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** Hypermedia as a Cognitive Tool Margit Pohl Dept. for Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria margit@igw.tuwien. ac.at "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
Analyzing hyperspectral BRDF data of a grass lawn and watercress surface using an empirical model

This paper presents results from analyzing hyperspectral BRDF data of grass lawn and watercress. The intensity of the hotspot as a function of wavelength is determined from fitting an empirical (or rather phenomenological) model to the data. The model consists of a lambertian, bowlshape, hotspot and forward scattering component. An analytical, theoretically derived relation between the hotspot intensity and the lambertian component is given. The intensity of the multiple scattered radiation obtained from this relation can be explained qualitatively with the surface structures of the samples.
Building Virtual Worlds: A City Planning Perspective

Computing, networking and virtual reality technologies are gradually approaching the level of maturity where large scale multi-user virtual environments will be possible. This will inevitably lead to the development of large scale spaces for the on-line community to meet, socialise and carry out business. We might consider these environments to be virtual towns or, eventually, virtual cities which contain many of the features, and problems of their real world counterparts. This paper draws on literature from the disciplines city planning and architecture to raise some of the issues which may be important in the design, development and administration of these environments in order to make them pleasant, usable and manageable.
PROSO: prosopographic records

We present PROSO, a reference model for the storage, use, publication and sharing of prosopographic records. PROSO is composed of three parts: a conceptual model, an XML serialization and a GRDDL transformation to RDF. The conceptual model is meant to provide researchers with a common vocabulary and conceptual organization to use while collecting and discussing the data; the XML serialization is used to transmit data across projects and independent parts of the same project; the GRDDL transformation is used to publish the records as Linked Data datasets using current ontologies and schemas.
Conquering vanishing gradient : Tensor Tree LSTM on aspect-sentiment classification

Our project focus on the problem of aspect specific sentiment analysis using recursive neural networks. Different from the previous studies where labels exist on every node of constituency tree, we have only one label each sentence, which is only on the root node, and it causes a severe vanishing gradient problem for both RNN and RNTN. To deal with such problem, we develop a classification algorithm specifically for data with only labels only for each sentence, instead of labels on each words. We deploy tree LSTM to solve the problem. and also reform it to a new model called ”Tensor Tree LSTM” as a combination of Tree LSTM and RNTN to conquer the vanishing gradient problem for RNTN.
Shallow groundwater thermal sensitivity to climate change and land cover disturbances: derivation of analytical expressions and implications for stream temperature modeling

Climate change is expected to increase stream temperatures and the projected warming may alter the spa- tial extent of habitat for cold-water fish and other aquatic taxa. Recent studies have proposed that stream thermal sen- sitivities, derived from short-term air temperature variations, can be employed to infer future stream warming due to long- term climate change. However, this approach does not con- sider the potential for streambed heat fluxes to increase due to gradual warming of the shallow subsurface. The temperature of shallow groundwater is particularly important for the ther- mal regimes of groundwater-dominated streams and rivers. Also, recent studies have investigated how land surface per- turbations, such as wildfires or timber harvesting, can influ- ence stream temperatures by changing stream surface heat fluxes, but these studies have typically not considered how these surface disturbances can also alter shallow groundwa- ter temperatures and streambed heat fluxes. In this study, several analytical solutions to the one- dimensional unsteady advection-diffusion equation for sub- surface heat transport are employed to estimate the timing and magnitude of groundwater temperature changes due to seasonal and long-term variability in land surface temper- atures. Groundwater thermal sensitivity formulae are pro- posed that accommodate different surface warming scenar- ios. The thermal sensitivity formulae suggest that shallow groundwater will warm in response to climate change and other surface perturbations, but the timing and magnitude of the subsurface warming depends on the rate of sur- face warming, subsurface thermal properties, bulk aquifer depth, and groundwater velocity. The results also empha- size the difference between the thermal sensitivity of shal- low groundwater to short-term (e.g., seasonal) and long- term (e.g., multi-decadal) land surface-temperature variabil- ity, and thus demonstrate the limitations of using short-term air and water temperature records to project future stream warming. Suggestions are provided for implementing these formulae in stream temperature models to accommodate groundwater warming.
Culturally Adapted Substance Use Interventions for Latino Adolescents

Purpose: To examine the characteristics and effects of culturally adapted substance use interventions with Latino adolescents on substance use outcomes. Methods: Systematic review and meta-analytic methods were used to synthesize effects across studies on substance use outcomes at posttest and follow-up time points. Results: Ten studies comprising 12,546 Latino adolescents met eligibility criteria. Meta-analytic results suggest positive, yet small effects on substance use outcomes at posttest and slightly larger effects at follow-up. A moderate amount of heterogeneity was observed; however, no variables tested explained the variance. The risk of bias assessment revealed that most studies were at high risk for performance and selection bias. Conclusions: Culturally adapted substance use interventions with Latino adolescents may be slightly more effective than other active interventions. We also uncovered important gaps and deficiencies in this body of research, including the need to examine potential secondary benefits of culturally adapted interventions.
Case-based Student Modelling: Unaccessible Solution Mode

Case-Based Student Modelling CBSM is a novel approach to student modelling which exploits the Case-Based Reasoning CBR technique for conceiving and developing the student models for an Intelligent T utoring System ITS. In developing the CBSM, we introduced two methods of interaction namely Accessible Solution AS mode and Unaccessible Solution US mode. In this paper, we rst brieey review our previous works dealing with the integration of the rst method of these interactions to develop an ITS called SARA. We present then our current model which is based on the second mode. We identify next a heuristic that allows us to discover the case that a student uses to solve a given problem. The process of student modelling and the modelling algorithm will also be presented. mots cl es: mod ele de l'apprenant, raisonnement a base de cas, mod elisation de l'apprenant a base de cas, r esolution de problemes, syst emes tutoriel intelligent.
Ad-Hoc Meeting Transcription on Clusters of Mobile Devices

For all the time invested in meetings, very little of the wealth of information that is exchanged is explicitly preserved. In this paper, we propose a novel platform for meeting transcription using cellular phones for recognition. As most meeting participants carry cellular phones with them, this platform will allow meetings to be transcribed wherever they take place, without requiring any additional infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce our proposed platform, and compare three approaches for combining audio from multiple devices: microphone selection, either at signal or feature level, and combination of decoder outputs via confusion network combination. We evaluated the effectiveness of our cellular phone based platform on speech collected in a meeting environment, and found that the early microphone selection at signal level obtained a 16% improvement in speech recognition accuracy compared to using a single recording device. Moreover, this approach offered a comparable performance to multi-system confusion network combination, while requiring signiﬁcantly lower computational cost.
Insights into the Melipona scutellaris (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini) fat body transcriptome

The insect fat body is a multifunctional organ analogous to the vertebrate liver. The fat body is involved in the metabolism of juvenile hormone, regulation of environmental stress, production of immunity regulator-like proteins in cells and protein storage. However, very little is known about the molecular mechanisms involved in fat body physiology in stingless bees. In this study, we analyzed the transcriptome of the fat body from the stingless bee Melipona scutellaris. In silico analysis of a set of cDNA library sequences yielded 1728 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and 997 high-quality sequences that were assembled into 29 contigs and 117 singlets. The BLAST X tool showed that 86% of the ESTs shared similarity with Apis mellifera (honeybee) genes. The M. scutellaris fat body ESTs encoded proteins with roles in numerous physiological processes, including anti-oxidation, phosphorylation, metabolism, detoxification, transmembrane transport, intracellular transport, cell proliferation, protein hydrolysis and protein synthesis. This is the first report to describe a transcriptomic analysis of specific organs of M. scutellaris. Our findings provide new insights into the physiological role of the fat body in stingless bees.
Noncontact heart beat signal extraction based on wavelet transform

Noncontact monitoring of vital signs by continuous wave Doppler radar is a promising technique in the field of health care. This paper proposed an improved heart beat signal extraction method based on wavelet transform for noncontact radar vital signal monitoring. The detection accuracy of heart beat rate by the proposed method was higher than bandpass filtering and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method (all p<;0.05) and the bandpass filtering method at different distances. Detection accuracy and signal to noise ratio varied inversely to distance. Male subjects in front case and female subjects in back case acquired higher accuracy than other orientations.