Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive divergence in embryonic thermal plasticity among Atlantic salmon populations

In the context of global changes, the long‐term viability of populations of endangered ectotherms may depend on their adaptive potential and ability to cope with temperature variations. We measured responses of Atlantic salmon embryos from four populations to temperature variations and used a QST–FST approach to study the adaptive divergence among these populations. Embryos were reared under two experimental conditions: a low temperature regime at 4 °C until eyed‐stage and 10 °C until the end of embryonic development and a high temperature regime with a constant temperature of 10 °C throughout embryonic development. Significant variations among populations and population × temperature interactions were observed for embryo survival, incubation time and length. QST was higher than FST in all but one comparison suggesting an important effect of divergent selection. QST was also higher under the high‐temperature treatment than at low temperature for length and survival due to a higher variance among populations under the stressful warmer treatment. Interestingly, heritability was lower for survival under high temperature in relation to a lower additive genetic variance under that treatment. Overall, these results reveal an adaptive divergence in thermal plasticity in embryonic life stages of Atlantic salmon suggesting that salmon populations may differentially respond to temperature variations induced by climate change. These results also suggest that changes in temperature may alter not only the adaptive potential of natural populations but also the selection regimes among them.
A comparison of negative and positive selection algorithms in novel pattern detection

This paper describes a technique based on immunological principles for novel (anomalous) pattern detection. It is a probabilistic method that uses a negative selection scheme (complement pattern space) to detect any changes in the normal behavior of monitored data patterns. The technique is compared with a positive selection approach (implemented by an ART neural network), which uses the (self-) pattern space for anomaly detection. Some experimental results in both cases are reported.
The production and distribution of knowledge in the markets-as-networks tradition

The objective of this paper is to provide a background to the Markets-as-Networks research tradition beyond the usual explanation of basic principles. This paradigm has long been recognized as a powerful force for critical, creative and forward-looking research in marketing. The paper tries to assess the impact that this work has had, and begins by positioning the Market-as-Networks tradition as a unique movement within the international marketing research academy. With no formal organization or leadership, no recognized journal and an implicit rather than an explicit agreement about the relevant agenda, it could be said to be more community than association. We go on to assess, using citation analysis, the relative impact of the publications arising from this body of researchers. Prominent IMP literature, including texts and articles, are taken as the sampling frame. The resultant citing of these articles is examined with respect to the journal in which the citing article is published. The Social Science Citation Index ® 1981-1997 is used to explore the impact of the concepts advocated by authors within the markets-as-networks tradition.
The Sleeve Anastomosis Revisited

The microvascular sleeve anastomosis, when one vessel is inserted into another, is presented in detail. Modifications of the original procedure are described and their performance is analyzed. It appears that the original sleeve anastomosis is a safe and expedient operative technique, whereas several present modifications thereof seem to lead to decreased patency rates. Insufficient dilatation of both vessel ends probably is the most important single factor in this regard.
The impact of government intervention on agricultural industry: a case study in the Israeli raw milk industry.

This research studies the effect of government intervention on the Israeli raw milk industry by examining the relationship between the producers’ costs and the price of milk. Like in many other countries, the government is actively involved in the Israeli agricultural market, including the raw milk production industry. The goal of government intervention is to ensure regular production and supply of basic, necessary milk products. Intervention manifests through the setting of production quotas and the price that the dairy farmers receive when selling their milk. According to accepted economic theory, the price that the government is supposed to set is the same one that would arise through a competitive market. The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between the price and marginal cost over two periods. The first period is from the years 1974 through 1994 and the second period is from 2010 through 2012. In the time between these two periods a fundamental change to the industry occurred in terms of the way the government interacted with the farmers. It will be interesting to see if the government policy change has an effect on the relationship between the price of milk and the marginal cost of the dairy farmers. The results of this study show that the price of milk is higher than the marginal cost, but the markup in both periods (1974 to 1994 and 2010 to 2012) is not particularly high.
New advances in the 3D characterization of mineral coating layers on paper

The surface characteristics of a large set of commercial lightweight coated paper grades are explored. The quantification of the 3D structure is revealed by atomic force microscopy, laser profilometry and X‐ray microtomography. This comprehensive study demonstrates the suitability of different and modern methods for assessing critical coating layer properties, thus identifying the right tools for specific structural analyses. Based on the assessment of the top and bottom surfaces of 25 commercial lightweight coated samples, three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) the facet orientation polar angle is a function of roughness, (2) skewness did not describe the surface details affecting the gloss of the commercial lightweight coated samples assessed in this study and (3) surface roughness at wavelengths below approximately 1.0 μm does not affect the paper gloss significantly. This is important knowledge for the understanding of lightweight coated paper surface structure and its properties.
Measurement accuracy on indoor positioning system using spread spectrum ultrasonic waves

This paper describes significant factors on spatial error distribution measured in a given indoor space with a local positioning system which utilizes spread spectrum ultrasonic waves generated by narrow directional ultrasonic transmitters. The positioning error has interestingly been discussed from the viewpoints of the dilution of precision (DOP) and the ranging error due to the transmitter directional characteristic, mainly. The indoor 3-D position is calculated by means of an algorithm using distances from the transmitters located at the four corners of the ceiling to a mobile receiver. From the result of these experiments, it has been usefully found that the positioning error can be more largely influenced on the DOP of vertical direction than it of horizontal direction and that its average is of 3.43[cm] rms for all 3-D measurable points. These findings obtained from the work imply that the 3-D indoor positioning can be realized with an acceptable centimeter-order of precision. Moreover, they suggest that it has to be considered from the viewpoints of not only the ranging error, which could be yielded by the distance measurement, but also the DOP, which is inevitably obtained by a geometrical arrangement relative to the transmitters and receiver.
Phase I/II Trial of Adjuvant Dose‐Dense Docetaxel/Epirubicin/Cyclophosphamide (TEC) in Stage II and III Breast Cancer

Abstract: This phase I/II trial investigates the safety and feasibility of six cycles of concurrent taxane, anthracycline and cyclophosphamide on a dose dense schedule. Patients with stage II/III breast cancer were treated with docetaxel (T) 75 mg/m2, epirubicin (E) 75 mg/m2 (cohort 1, n = 3) or 100 mg/m2 (cohort 2, n = 12), and cyclophosphamide (C) 500 mg/m2 IV on day 1, with pegfilgrastim 6 mg subcutaneously on day 2, every 2 weeks for six cycles. Patients were assessed for toxicity every 2 weeks; cardiac function and response (if neoadjuvant) were assessed after six cycles. All patients in cohort 1 received 100% planned dose intensity; in cohort 2, five of twelve patients received 100% and 11/12 received >80%. There were no dose reductions or delays for day 1 myelotoxicity. Dose reductions as a result of febrile neutropenia (FN) occurred in cohort 2, with six of twelve patients experiencing FN in seven of sixty‐nine cycles. Six patients had anemia ≥grade 3; five received RBC transfusion and seven received an erythropoietic growth factor. Four patients required dose reductions for nonhematologic toxicity (two mucositis; one neurotoxicity; one diarrhea + cellulitis). Four patients developed thrombophlebitis, which was associated with FN in one of four. Two of fourteen evaluable patients had asymptomatic decreases in LVEF >10%; all remained within normal range. All four patients receiving neoadjuvant TEC had significant clinical responses (one CR, three PR). No pathologic CRs were seen. Conclusions: Dose dense TEC chemotherapy is feasible, has acceptable toxicity at doses equivalent to TAC (docetaxel 75 mg/m2, epirubicin 75 mg/m2, cyclophosphamide 600 mg/m2), and has moderate but manageable toxicity using a higher epirubicin dose of 100 mg/m2, with FN occurring in six of twelve patients at the higher dose.
A DATA FLOW IMPLEMENTATION OF AGENT-BASED DISTRIBUTED GRAPH SEARCH | NIST

Biological ants organize themselves into forager groups that converge to shortest paths to and from food sources. This has motivated development a large class of biologically inspired agent-based graph search techniques, called Ant Colony Optimization, to solve diverse combinatorial problems. Our approach to parallel graph search uses multiple ant agent populations distributed across processors and clustered computers to solve large-scale graph search problems. We discuss our implementation using the NIST Data Flow System II, and show good scalability of our parallel search algorithm.
Rats hippocampal field potentials feature extraction of wake and sleep stages in Euclidean space

This paper presents a new methodology of feature extraction of sleep and wake stages of a freely behaving rat based on Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). The automatic separation of those stages is very useful for experiments related to learning and memory consolidation since recent scientific evidence indicates that sleep is strongly involved with offline reprocessing of acquired information during waking. Our approach transforms hippocampal Local Field Potentials (LFP) in data vectors that describe the energy distribution pattern of the signal on scaled Morlet wavelets projections. Results indicate that the mathematical analysis used in this work can sensibly describe brain signal patterns that correlate to states of behaviour and that our method can be used for a wider range of applications in neuroscience research.
METRICS PERFORMANCE COMPARISON FOR COLOR IMAGE DATABASE

In this paper, we exploit a new database of distorted test images TID2008 for verification of full-reference metrics of image visual quality. A comparative analysis of TID20008 and its nearest analog LIVE Database is presented. For a wide variety of known metrics, their correspondence to human visual system is evaluated. The values of rank correlations of Spearman and Kendall with the considered metrics and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) obtained by exploiting TID2008 in experiments are presented. The metrics are verified for both full set of distorted test images in TID2008 (1700 distorted images, 17 types of distortions) and for particular subsets of TID2008 that include distortions most important for digital image processing applications.
Difference in Perseverative Errors during a Visual Attention Task with Auditory Distractors in Alpha-9 Nicotinic Receptor Subunit Wild Type and Knock-Out Mice

The auditory efferent system is a neural network that originates in the auditory cortex and projects to the cochlear receptor through olivocochlear (OC) neurons. Medial OC neurons make cholinergic synapses with outer hair cells (OHCs) through nicotinic receptors constituted by α9 and α10 subunits. One of the physiological functions of the α9 nicotinic receptor subunit (α9-nAChR) is the suppression of auditory distractors during selective attention to visual stimuli. In a recent study we demonstrated that the behavioral performance of alpha-9 nicotinic receptor knock-out (KO) mice is altered during selective attention to visual stimuli with auditory distractors since they made less correct responses and more omissions than wild type (WT) mice. As the inhibition of the behavioral responses to irrelevant stimuli is an important mechanism of the selective attention processes, behavioral errors are relevant measures that can reflect altered inhibitory control. Errors produced during a cued attention task can be classified as premature, target and perseverative errors. Perseverative responses can be considered as an inability to inhibit the repetition of an action already planned, while premature responses can be considered as an index of the ability to wait or retain an action. Here, we studied premature, target and perseverative errors during a visual attention task with auditory distractors in WT and KO mice. We found that α9-KO mice make fewer perseverative errors with longer latencies than WT mice in the presence of auditory distractors. In addition, although we found no significant difference in the number of target error between genotypes, KO mice made more short-latency target errors than WT mice during the presentation of auditory distractors. The fewer perseverative error made by α9-KO mice could be explained by a reduced motivation for reward and an increased impulsivity during decision making with auditory distraction in KO mice.
Exposing profiles to build trust in a recommender

This paper describes a method for increasing trust in a TV show recommender. We look for people in common between programs users watch and new programs that are highly rated by our TV show recommender. We then present these to users in a conversational sentence, helping them decide if they want to try the new show. This method has been implemeted in our current TV show recommender interface and will be tested in the near future.
Deuterium magnetic resonance: theory and application to lipid membranes

Proton and carbon-13 nmr spectra of unsonicated lipid bilayers and biological membranes are generally dominated by strong proton–proton and proton–carbon dipolar interactions. As a result the spectra contain a large number of overlapping resonances and are rather difficult to analyse. Nevertheless, important information on the structure and dynamic behaviour of lipid systems has been provided by these techniques (Wennerström & Lindblom, 1977).
Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1092 Regulation of Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor Signaling and its Targeting in Cancer Therapy

Ma, H. 2015. Regulation of Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor Signaling and its Targeting in Cancer Therapy. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1092. 64 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9220-5. Overactivity of platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR) is a frequent event in many types of solid tumors. Therefore, it is of great importance to uncover the mechanisms that regulate PDGF/PDGFR signalling, to develop efficient inhibitors targeting this pathway. The first step of downregulation of PDGFR activity upon ligand binding is internalization; thus we investigated how endocytosis pathways affect PDGFR signaling. We showed that in Rastransformed fibroblasts, the internalization of PDGFR is shifted from the routine clathrindependent endocytosis to macropinocytosis, which results in enhanced PDGFR activity and subsequent downstream signalling, promoting anchorage-independent growth. We were also interested in how intracellular trafficking regulates signalling attenuation of PDGFR. We found that His-domain containing protein tyrosine phosphatase (HD-PTP) positively regulates phosphorylation level of the ubiquitin-ligases c-Cbl and Cbl-b; consistently, silencing of HD-PTP led to a decreased level of PDGFR ubiquitination (paper II). Consequently, internalized PDGFR could not be sorted properly and escaped degradation. This resulted in enhanced activation of phospholipase C γ (PLCγ) and signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 3 signalling, which further increased colony formation of HD-PTP silenced cells in soft agar, indicating a tumor suppressor role of HD-PTP. Activation of PDGFR leads to stimulation of downstream pathways. We identified Fer kinase as a critical signal transducer downstream of PDGFR in a proteomic screen. We showed that Fer kinase is essential for PDGF-induced STAT3 activation; as a result (paper III), Fer depletion severely blunted the ability of PDGFR signalling to promote anchorage-independent growth in soft agar and delayed tumor initiation in a mouse model. The crosstalk between host and tumor plays a critical role in tumor progression. At present most anti-cancer drugs are targeting tumor cells; we were interested in how targeting tumor host cells affects the efficacy of anti-tumor therapy. We found that selective PDGFRβ inhibition in host cells exerted tumor inhibitory effects on growth and vascularization of tumors with autocrine PDGF signaling, whereas tumors lacking such stimulation show only minor response on tumor growth (paper IV). Meanwhile, we demonstrated that PDGF/PDGFRβ signalling promotes expression of NG2, a marker for pericytes.
Plasticity of skeletal muscle phenotype: Mechanical consequences

Muscles are complex biological machines that perform a wide variety of mechanical activities. Over the past 30 to 40 years, a large amount of effort has been devoted to understanding cellular/molecular responses of skeletal muscle to various altered physiological states (e.g., altered loading state induced via immobilization/spaceflight, resistance training). Many cellular/molecular adaptations brought about by such interventions act on underlying processes that regulate activation, force and velocity of shortening/lengthening, and relaxation. In this context, measurements of mechanical properties (e.g., force–velocity relationship) are important, because they can provide insight into the physiological consequences of such adaptations. During the course of the past 10 to 15 years, a number of investigators have employed the work‐loop technique to provide a more realistic approach toward understanding muscle function. Additionally, the work‐loop technique provides a unique conceptual perspective that integrates: (1) the length–tension relationship, (2) activation kinetics, (3) the force–velocity relationship in the shortening domain, (4) relaxation kinetics, (5) the force–velocity relationship in the lengthening domain, and (6) the compliance of the passive elastic elements. A discussion of those factors (i.e., factors 2–5) that appear to be highly malleable forms the basis of this paper. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Muscle Nerve 26: 740–768, 2002
Logistics Organization and the Information System

Information technology is changing the nature of logistics organization. It is reducing the cost of transactions and redefining organizations and their interconnections. This paper examines the impact through the concept of transaction costs. This leads to discussion of current trends toward electronic integration and outsourcing of logistics services. The use of advanced information technology is redefining the role of the logistics manager.
Are competition and corporate social responsibility compatible?: The myth of sustainable competitive advantage

Purpose – While fierce global competition has negative environmental and social impacts and may lead large companies to act irresponsibly, corporate social responsibility (CSR) academic literature, especially stakeholder theory, pays little attention to competition and market pressure. It only highlights the competitive advantage a CSR strategy represents for companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between CSR and competition in order to contribute to the CSR concept through analysis of the conditions for its implementation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws upon the academic literature in economics and strategic management, on mainstream CSR papers and on the official disclosure and communication from companies listed on the “CAC 40” of the French stock market. The paper uses the definition of corporate responsibility which integrates companies' environmental and social concerns into all their activities. Findings – The following three major findings arise. First, on a theoretical level and in terms of corporate disclosure on CSR, a large gap is noticed in how the economic view and the CSR view of competition are represented. Second, it is observed that the limits of the competitive advantage obtained by CSR strategy while the “demand for virtue” is weak even if the stakeholders' “expectations” for responsible practices are strong. In fact, a typology of CSR strategies is proposed related to competitive situations. Third, the paradox of the CSR competitive advantage is underlined: specifically, it is gained only if not imitable, i.e. if companies prevent the mimetic practices which could spread best practices for sustainable development. Originality/value – The paper highlights the limits of the CSR concept within the liberal paradigm, arguing that the mainstream theoretical CSR framework based on the hypothesis of the convergence between firms' objectives and the common interest is not relevant. The framework of the neo-institutional theory is more appropriate to analyse the mimetic behaviour in competitive markets and corporate commitments in sector-based codes of conduct that define new norms of social quality.
Supported and unsupported breast displacement in three dimensions across treadmill activity levels

Abstract Appropriate sports bras are crucial to limit potential breast pain and ptosis. In an attempt to optimize breast support during exercise, manufacturers now produce activity level-specific sports bras. However, until breast movement across activity levels is understood, the criterion for such apparel is unknown. Therefore, the aim of this study was to quantify multi-planar breast displacement across treadmill activity levels and breast support conditions. Twenty-one D cup participants had markers attached to their nipples and trunk to calculate relative 3D breast displacement. Supported and unsupported mediolateral, anterioposterior, vertical, and resultant breast displacement was assessed during treadmill walking up to maximum running. Unsupported resultant breast displacement increased from 4.2 ± 1.0 cm during walking to 15.2 ± 4.2 cm during running. There was no change in breast displacement amplitude or direction as running speed increased above 10 km · h−1, with vertical breast displacement then accounting for ∼50% of overall displacement. While breast support was effective in reducing the amplitude of breast displacement during walking and running, the direction was unaffected. In conclusion, instead of activity level-specific breast support, future research should identify multi-planar breast kinematics during various sporting modalities. This might lead to production of a sports-specific bra to reduce the negative consequences of breast movement.