Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Upper Airway Dysfunction of Tau-P301L Mice Correlates with Tauopathy in Midbrain and Ponto-Medullary Brainstem Nuclei

Tauopathy comprises hyperphosphorylation of the microtubule-associated protein tau, causing intracellular aggregation and accumulation as neurofibrillary tangles and neuropil treads. Some primary tauopathies are linked to mutations in the MAPT gene coding for protein tau, but most are sporadic with unknown causes. Also, in Alzheimer's disease, the most frequent secondary tauopathy, neither the cause nor the pathological mechanisms and repercussions are understood. Transgenic mice expressing mutant Tau-P301L suffer cognitive and motor defects and die prematurely from unknown causes. Here, in situ electrophysiology in symptomatic Tau-P301L mice (7–8 months of age) revealed reduced postinspiratory discharges of laryngeal motor outputs that control laryngeal constrictor muscles. Under high chemical drive (hypercapnia), postinspiratory discharge was nearly abolished, whereas laryngeal inspiratory discharge was increased disproportionally. The latter may suggest a shift of postinspiratory laryngeal constrictor activity into inspiration. In vivo double-chamber plethysmography of Tau-P301L mice showed significantly reduced respiratory airflow but significantly increased chest movements during baseline breathing, but particularly in hypercapnia, confirming a significant increase in inspiratory resistive load. Histological analysis demonstrated hyperphosphorylated tau in brainstem nuclei, directly or indirectly involved in upper airway motor control (i.e., the Kölliker–Fuse, periaqueductal gray, and intermediate reticular nuclei). In contrast, young Tau-P301L mice did not show breathing disorders or brainstem tauopathy. Consequently, in aging Tau-P301L mice, progressive upper airway dysfunction is linked to progressive tauopathy in identified neural circuits. Because patients with tauopathy suffer from upper airway dysfunction, the Tau-P301L mice can serve as an experimental model to study disease-specific synaptic dysfunction in well defined functional neural circuits.
300-Hz subthalamic oscillations in Parkinson's disease.

Despite several studies and models, much remains unclear about how the human basal ganglia operate. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an effective treatment for complicated Parkinson's disease, but how DBS acts also remains unknown. The clinical benefit of DBS at frequencies >100 Hz suggests the possible importance of neural rhythms operating at frequencies higher than the range normally considered for basal ganglia processing (<100 Hz). The electrodes implanted for DBS also offer the opportunity to record neural activity from the human basal ganglia. This study aimed to assess whether oscillations at frequencies >100 Hz operate in the human STN. While recording local field potentials from the STN of nine patients with Parkinson's disease through DBS electrodes, we found a dopamine- and movement-dependent 300-Hz rhythm. At rest, and in the absence of dopaminergic medication, in most cases (eight out of 11 nuclei) the 100-1000 Hz band showed no consistent rhythm. Levodopa administration elicited (or markedly increased) a 300-Hz rhythm at rest [(mean +/- SD) central frequency: 319 +/- 33 Hz; bandwidth: 72 +/- 21 Hz; power increase (after medication - before medication)/before medication: 1.30 +/- 1.25; n = 11, P = 0.00098]. The 300-Hz rhythm was also increased by apomorphine, but not by orphenadrine. The 300-Hz rhythm was modulated by voluntary movement. Before levodopa administration, movement-related power increase in the 300-Hz rhythm was variably present in different subjects, whereas after levodopa it became a robust phenomenon [before 0.014 +/- 0.014 arbitrary units (AU), after 0.178 +/- 0.339 AU; n = 8, P = 0.0078]. The dopamine-dependent 300-Hz rhythm probably reflects a bistable compound nuclear activity and supports high-resolution information processing in the basal ganglia circuit. An absent 300-Hz subthalamic rhythm could be a pathophysiological clue in Parkinson's disease. The 300-Hz rhythm also provides the rationale for an excitatory--and not only inhibitory--interpretation of DBS mechanism of action in humans.
Quality Assessment of Mutation Operators Dedicated for C# Programs

The mutation technique inserts faults in a program under test in order to assess or generate test cases, or evaluate the reliability of the program. Faults introduced into the source code are defined using mutation operators. They should be related to different, also object-oriented features of a program. The most research on OO mutations was devoted to Java programs. This paper describes analytical and empirical study performed to evaluate the quality of advanced mutation operators for C# programs. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of different mutation operators. Unit tests suites and functional tests were used in experiments. A detailed analysis was conducted on mutation operators dealing with delegates and exception handling
The Synapse Project: Engagement in mentally challenging activities enhances neural efficiency

Purpose: Correlational and limited experimental evidence suggests that an engaged lifestyle is associated with the maintenance of cognitive vitality in old age. However, the mechanisms underlying these engagement effects are poorly understood. We hypothesized that mental effort underlies engagement effects and used fMRI to examine the impact of high-challenge activities (digital photography and quilting) compared with low-challenge activities (socializing or performing low-challenge cognitive tasks) on neural function at pretest, posttest, and one year after the engagement program. Methods: In the scanner, participants performed a semantic-classification task with two levels of difficulty to assess the modulation of brain activity in response to task demands. Results: The High-Challenge group, but not the Low-Challenge group, showed increased modulation of brain activity in medial frontal, lateral temporal, and parietal cortex—regions associated with attention and semantic processing—some of which were maintained a year later. This increased modulation stemmed from decreases in brain activity during the easy condition for the High-Challenge group and was associated with time committed to the program, age, and cognition. Conclusions: Sustained engagement in cognitively demanding activities facilitated cognition by increasing neural efficiency. Mentally-challenging activities may be neuroprotective and an important element to maintaining a healthy brain into late adulthood.
Refactoring planning and practice in agile software development: an empirical study

Agile software engineering increasingly seeks to incorporate design modification and continuous refactoring in order to maintain code quality even in highly dynamic environments. However, there does not currently appear to be an industry-wide consensus on how to do this and research in this area expresses conflicting opinions. This paper presents an empirical study based upon an industry survey aimed at understanding the different ways that refactoring is thought of by the different people carrying out different roles in agile processes and how these different people weigh the importance of refactoring versus other kinds of tasks in the process. The study found good support for the importance of refactoring, but most respondents agreed that deferred refactoring impacts the agility of their process. Thus there was no universally agreed-upon strategy for planning refactoring. The survey findings also indicated that different roles have different perspectives on the different kinds of tasks in an agile process although all seem to want to increase the priority given to refactoring during planning for the iterations in agile development. Analysis of the survey raised many interesting questions suggesting the need for a considerable amount of future research.
On the morphology of the compact dust shell in the symbiotic system HM Sagittae

Context. The symbiotic system HM Sagittae consists of a Mira star and a secondary White Dwarf component. The dust content of the system was severely affected by the nova outburst in 1975, which is still ongoing. The capabilities of optical interferometry operating in the mid-IR allow us to investigate the current geometry of the dust envelope. Aims. We test our previous spectro-interferometric study of this system with new interferometric configurations, increasing the uv coverage and allowing us to ascertain the appearance of the source between 8 and 13 μ m. Methods. We used the MIDI instrument of the VLTI with the unit telescopes (UTs) and auxiliary telescopes (ATs) providing baselines oriented from PA = 42° to 127°. The data are interpreted by means of an elliptical Gaussian model and the spherical radiative transfer code DUSTY. Results. We demonstrate that the data can be reproduced well by an optically thick dust shell of amorphous silicate, typical of those encountered around Mira stars, whose measured dimension increases from 8 to 13 μ m. We confirm that the envelope is more extended in a direction perpendicular to the binary axis. The level of elongation increases with wavelength in contrast to our claim in a previous study. Conclusions. The wider uv coverage allows us to deepen our previous investigations of the close circumstellar structure of this object.
Raising social consciousness through verbatim theatre: a realist evaluation

Abstract Background: Verbatim theatre has the potential to raise social consciousness around difficult social issues, but consideration needs to be given to the philosophical and practice aspects of evaluating social consciousness. Methods: A mixed methods design consisting of survey and ethnographic data was used within Realist frameworks. Results: Four Context-Mechanism-Outcome configurations were developed. These allowed exploration of transformative learning as the key to understanding how verbatim theatre could raise social consciousness. Conclusions: From a Critical Realist perspective, verbatim theatre can potentially raise social consciousness through a transformative learning mechanism that consists of emotional and cognitive components. However, a number of factors need to be taken into consideration.
Energy Pattern Aided Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

In echoing Varshney's seminal concept of jointly transmitting information and energy, we propose the concept of an energy pattern aided Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) system, where in addition to power transfer, information is conveyed both by the specific Receive Antenna (RA) indices to which the power is delivered as well as by the particular intensity of the power assigned to that particular RA pattern. By embedding information into energy patterns rather than imposing it by modulating classic radio waveforms, our proposed solution is capable of operating both in an integrated receiver mode and in a power-split mode, while relying on a low-complexity two-stage non-coherent detection algorithm. Both our analysis and simulations show that our energy pattern aided SWIPT system exhibits a beneficial immunity to any potential performance degradation imposed by power-conversion. Moreover, the achievable rate versus power conversion trade-off bounds are characterized, demonstrating that our proposed energy pattern aided SWIPT system leads to a beneficial wireless information and power transfer convergence.
Learning from Peers: Motivating Students through Reputation Systems

Our on-line students, being mainly busy worker-students, study almost alone. To improve their interaction we use asynchronous tools (Wiki or forums), but we notice that interaction becomes high mainly when the discussion is focused on a task to be graded for the exam or when the teacher/tutor is very active in the community. We present SOCIALX, our exercise sharing tool, an application to e-learning of a simple reputation system to increase the student motivation and interaction, and to let them learning from each other, either by reusing other's solutions or by correcting other's mistakes. Moreover, students gain reputation from others reusing their solutions. In this we want to engage students in learning activities at the highest cognitive levels of the Bloom taxonomy.
A Functional Workbench for Anopheles gambiae Micro Array Analysis

Insecticide resistance, a character inherited that encompasses alteration in one or more of insect's genes is now a major public health challenge combating world efforts on malaria control strategies. Anopheles has developed heavy resistance to pyrethroids, the only World Health Organization (WHO) recommended class for Indoor Residual Spray (IRS) and Long-Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets (LLITNs) through P450 pathways. We used the biochemical network of Anopheles gambiae (henceforth Ag) to deduce its resistance mechanism(s) using two expression data (when Ag is treated with pyrethroid and when controlled). The employed computational techniques are accessible by a robust, multi-faceted and friendly automated graphic user interface (GUI) tagged 'workbench' with JavaFX Scenebuilder. In this work, we introduced a computational platform to determine and also elucidate for the first time resistance mechanism to a commonly used class of insecticide, Pyrethroid. Significantly, our work is the first computational work to identify genes associated or involved in the efflux system in Ag and as a resistance mechanism in the Anopheles.
Visibilité de la production scientifique : une étude scientométrique au Pôle Universitaire Lyonnais

L’infometrie joue un role important dans l’evaluation des organismes de recherche et de leur politique. Dans ce contexte, nous presentons les resultats d’une etude scientometrique sur la production des chercheurs des etablissements scientifiques du Pole Universitaire Lyonnais menee entre 2000 et 2005. Informetrics plays an important part in the evaluation of research organizations as well as their policies. In this context, we will share results from a scientometric study on outputs from University of Lyon scientific research centers conducted between 2000 and 2005.
Pellets recovered from stick nests and new diet items of Furnariidae (Aves: Passeriformes)

This is the first record showing eleven species in seven genera of Furnariidae (Aves: Passeriformes) from Argentina that regurgitate pellets. A total of 627 nests of Furnariidae was examined, and from 84 nests (13.3%), 1,329 pellets were recovered. These pellets were found in the closed, domed nests of many Furnariidae, because in comparison to other passerine birds, their nests were used for roosting, especially in the subfamily Synallaxinae. Anumbius annumbi had the highest percentage of nests containing pellets. Food items identified from the pellets provided important new data on the diets of several species of Furnariidae.
Online Botnet Detection by Continuous Similarity Monitoring

Botnet detection has attracted lots of attention. But few works have considered online detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that can monitor the botnet activities in real time. We define the concept of “feature stream” to describe raw network traffics. If some feature streams show high similarities, the corresponding host will be regarded as suspicious bots which will be added into the candidate bots set to confirm the final results. The experimental evaluations show that our approach can detect botnet activities successfully with high efficiency and low false positive rate.
Mean-Variance Hedging with Uncertain Trade Execution

The purpose of mean-variance hedging is to find a dynamic hedging strategy minimizing the unconditional squared hedging error (where error equals the difference between the value of a self-financing portfolio and the value of a derivative asset at maturity). In the thesis we focused on discrete-time models for which the standard mean-variance theory (in the most general setting with locally squareintegrable price processes) is described in Černý and Kallsen (2007). We extended this theory to situations where there is non-zero probability that a trade may not be executed at any given time. The economic rationale for such a model is derived from limit market orders. Compared to classical mean-variance hedging theory the new problem contains an additional endogenous state variable. We identified this state variable and derived full dynamic programming solution for the optimal strategy.
OOP-based Device-to-Device Communication simulator design of LTE network

Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication is an innovative mobile network technology, which is one of the key technologies in LTE-Advanced system. D2D communication can realize cellular users directly connect to transfer data under the eNodeB's control. This technology brings higher system capacity and mitigates the eNodeB's load. In order to evaluate the performance of this new technology, D2D communication system level simulation based in LTE network is needed. In this paper, we design D2D simulator module based on LTE system level simulator which is developed by Vienna University of Technology. This module realizes initialization of the LTE-D2D network, measurement of interference to cellular users caused by D2D users and link quality for D2D users. We can design algorithm of radio resource allocation including power and frequency for D2D users and valuate the LTE-D2D network performance in this simulator.
Managing multiple disjoint priority orders in priority queues

In communication and computer systems, autonomous sources may assign priorities to their messages or jobs locally and independently. When a remote service (e.g., message transmission or RPC) is requested at a shared server, the server cannot use priority scheduling schemes effectively unless it can make a comparison between priorities defined by individual sources. The authors investigate the strategies under which the service received by requests of one source is not affected by the priority assignments at other sources. The first approach is a combination of processor-sharing and priority queue strategies. The second approach is to map locally defined priorities onto a global priority system. The performance of these approaches is examined in terms of the average response time of all requests, the average response time of the highest priority requests and a fairness measure. <<ETX>>
Airflow in the Human Nasal Passage and Sinuses of Chronic Rhinosinusitis Subjects

Endoscopic surgery is performed on patients with chronic inflammatory disease of the paranasal sinuses to improve sinus ventilation. Little is known about how sinus surgery affects sinonasal airflow. In this study nasal passage geometry was reconstructed from computed tomographic imaging from healthy normal, pre-operative, and post-operative subjects. Transient air flow through the nasal passage during calm breathing was simulated. Subject-specific differences in ventilation of the nasal passage were observed. Velocity magnitude at ostium was different between left and right airway. In FESS, airflow in post-surgical subjects, airflow at the maxillary sinus ostium was upto ten times higher during inspiration. In a Lothrop procedure, airflow at the frontal sinus ostium can be upto four times higher during inspiration. In both post-operative subjects, airflow at ostium was not quasi-steady. The subject-specific effect (of surgery) on sinonasal interaction evaluated through airflow simulations may have important consequences for pre- and post-surgical assessment and surgical planning, and design for improvement of the delivery efficiency of nasal therapeutics.
LINKING HABITAT AND POPULATION MODELS TO DETERMINE THE EFFECT OF HYDROPEAKING ON SALMON POPULATIONS

Hydropeaking induces flow alterations in rivers caused by hydropower plants. Water is released or held back depending on the power demand and hence changes the flow regime of rivers. To assess the ecological impact of such management strategies ecological models can be used. Models for ecological systems can be based on various approaches and as such focus on different system aspects. Whereas engineering science uses habitat models to simulate the suitability of the abiotic environment for supporting the biota under investigation, biological science focuses more on processes occurring within the biotic life-cycle (such as birth, mortality and migration). The intention of ecosystem modelling is similar in both cases, so a more complete coupling of these approaches may provide a better understanding and predictive ability of system dynamics. In this paper we present the integrating of the habitat simulation model CASiMiR and the population model IB-salmon for predicting the effect of hydropeaking on Atlantic salmon populations as executed within the Norwegian EnviPEAK project funded by CEDREN (Centre for Environmental Design of Renewable Energy; Environmental impacts of hydropeaking). The habitat simulation model CASiMiR is used to predict the stranding risk of salmon individuals in different age classes resulting from rapid changes in flow rates. This involves three major steps. Firstly, suitable habitats are identified by assessing hydro-morphological parameters using a knowledge-based multivariate fuzzy-logic rule set (defined from expert opinion). Secondly, the rate of change in water depth based on flow rates and its influence on stranding risk is assessed. Thirdly, hydraulically isolated areas that have the potential for fish stranding and thus are high risk areas during downramping are determined by combining the preceded steps, and the final stranding risk is estimated. Stranding risk from this model is then included as a mortality function in the population model IB-salmon. This model is a spatiallyexplicit individual based model (spatial step = 50 m, time-step = one week) designed for simulating Atlantic salmon population abundance within rivers using heuristic-based functions derived from the literature and field studies conducted by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA).
Pro-Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Inhibits GABAergic Neurotransmission by Activating Endocytosis and Repression of GABAA Receptors

GABA is the canonical inhibitory neurotransmitter in the CNS. This inhibitory action is largely mediated by GABA type A receptors (GABAARs). Among the many factors controlling GABAergic transmission, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) appears to play a major role in regulating synaptic inhibition. Recent findings have demonstrated that BDNF can be released as a precursor (proBDNF). Although the role of mature BDNF on GABAergic synaptogenesis and maintenance has been well studied, an important question still unanswered is whether secreted proBDNF might affect GABAergic neurotransmission. Here, we have used 14 d in vitro primary culture of hippocampal neurons and ex vivo preparations from rats to study the function of proBDNF in regulation of GABAAR trafficking and activity. We demonstrate that proBDNF impairs GABAergic transmission by the activation of two distinct pathways: (1) a RhoA-Rock-PTEN pathway that decreases the phosphorylation levels of GABAAR, thus affecting receptor function and triggering endocytosis and degradation of internalized receptors, and (2) a JAK-STAT-ICER pathway leading to the repression of GABAARs synthesis. These effects lead to the diminution of GABAergic synapses and are correlated with a decrease in GABAergic synaptic currents. These results revealed new functions for proBDNF-p75 neurotrophin receptor signaling pathway in the control of the efficacy of GABAergic synaptic activity by regulating the trafficking and synthesis of GABAARs at inhibitory synapses.