Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Small Molecule TrkB Ligand Reduces Motor Impairment and Neuropathology in R6/2 and BACHD Mouse Models of Huntington's Disease

Loss of neurotrophic support in the striatum caused by reduced brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels plays a critical role in Huntington's disease (HD) pathogenesis. BDNF acts via TrkB and p75 neurotrophin receptors (NTR), and restoring its signaling is a prime target for HD therapeutics. Here we sought to determine whether a small molecule ligand, LM22A-4, specific for TrkB and without effects on p75NTR, could alleviate HD-related pathology in R6/2 and BACHD mouse models of HD. LM22A-4 was administered to R6/2 mice once daily (5–6 d/week) from 4 to 11 weeks of age via intraperitoneal and intranasal routes simultaneously to maximize brain levels. The ligand reached levels in the R6/2 forebrain greater than the maximal neuroprotective dose in vitro and corrected deficits in activation of striatal TrkB and its key signaling intermediates AKT, PLCγ, and CREB. Ligand-induced TrkB activation was associated with a reduction in HD pathologies in the striatum including decreased DARPP-32 levels, neurite degeneration of parvalbumin-containing interneurons, inflammation, and intranuclear huntingtin aggregates. Aggregates were also reduced in the cortex. Notably, LM22A-4 prevented deficits in dendritic spine density of medium spiny neurons. Moreover, R6/2 mice given LM22A-4 demonstrated improved downward climbing and grip strength compared with those given vehicle, though these groups had comparable rotarod performances and survival times. In BACHD mice, long-term LM22A-4 treatment (6 months) produced similar ameliorative effects. These results support the hypothesis that targeted activation of TrkB inhibits HD-related degenerative mechanisms, including spine loss, and may provide a disease mechanism-directed therapy for HD and other neurodegenerative conditions.
POSTER: Improved Markov Strength Meters for Passwords

Markov-based strength meters provide more accurate estimate of password strength as opposed to rule-based strength meters. However, we observed that these meters assign very high scores to slightly altered weak passwords. It is important to score modified variants of weak passwords more conservatively as the existing password cracking tools generate such guesses much more quickly. In this paper, we propose a simple greedy algorithm to detect small alterations and improve the scoring mechanism of Markov strength meters.
Solitons - A Bridge between Mathematics and Physics

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the study of nonlinear phenomena. These systems exist in all research fields, such as fluid mechanics, elastic media, optical fibers, nuclear physics, relativistic quantum mechanics, high-energy physics, plasma physics, biology, solid-state physics, chemical kinematics, chemical physics, geochemistry, etc. Emphasis is put particularly on seeking explicit solutions for non-linear evolution equations. A variety of methods were devoted to studying different types of nonlinearities of optical materials and they have played (and still play) a major role in mathematical physics. In fact, scholars have been interested in the study of localized structure of waves, which ignore dispersion or diffraction processes. In this short review, we cannot cover all existing knowledge today. We will only highlight the importance of solitons in real life where the nonlinearity plays an important role.
Relation Extraction from Chinese News Web Documents Based on Weakly Supervised Learning

Extracting instances of a given target relation from a given Web page corpus seems to be the basic work to exploit nearly endless source of knowledge which provided by the World Wide Web. Supervised learning requires a large amount of labeled data, but the data labeling process can be expensive and time consuming.In this paper we present a kernel-based weakly supervised machine learning algorithm for relation extraction. It takes a small set of target relations as input. The goal is to automatically extract arbitrary binary relations from Web documents in the domain of football games. Bootstrapping is used to improve the performance of the system. We also compare the performances on different input example sizes.Experimental results show the effectiveness and benefits of our approach.
Additional Thoughts Concerning the Legal Status of a Non-biological Machine

Law, as a pragmatic tool, provides us with a way to test, at a conceptual level, whether a humanly created non-biological machine could be considered a legal person. This paper looks first at the history of law in order to set the foundation for the suggestion that as a normative system it is based on a folk psychology model. Accepting this as a starting point allows us to look to empirical studies in this area to gather support for the idea that “intentionality”, in the folk psychology sense, can give us a principled way to argue that non-biological machines can become legal persons. In support of this argument I also look at corporate law theory. However, as is often the case, because law has historically been viewed as a human endeavor, complications arise when we attempt to apply its concepts to non-human persons. The distinction between human, person and property is discussed in this regard, with particular note being taken of the concept of slavery. The conclusion drawn is that intentionality in the folk sense is a reasonable basis upon which to rest at least one leg of an argument that a nonbiological machine can be viewed as a legal person.
Effects of Bank Mergers on Risk Leading Up to the 2007-2008 Mortgage Crisis

Recent highly-publicized bank mergers following the home mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, often the result of bank failure or insolvency, brought attention to the issue of consolidation within the banking industry. The banking system has seen increases in consolidation at national levels, with the largest banks gaining increasingly greater proportions of market share. This merger activity and the existence of such “too big to fail” institutions has attracted concern about potential moral hazard due to perceptions about government bailouts and dangers posed by under-capitalized banks. Literature on the topic has found connections between merger activity and increased leverage, as well as a positive association between risk-taking and leverage, exacerbated in larger banks; together, this suggests that mergers may indirectly have an effect on risk-taking behavior in financial firms. This paper explores a possible link between M&A and risk in the context of the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
C. difficile 630Δerm Spo0A Regulates Sporulation, but Does Not Contribute to Toxin Production, by Direct High-Affinity Binding to Target DNA

Clostridium difficile is a Gram positive, anaerobic bacterium that can form highly resistant endospores. The bacterium is the causative agent of C. difficile infection (CDI), for which the symptoms can range from a mild diarrhea to potentially fatal pseudomembranous colitis and toxic megacolon. Endospore formation in Firmicutes, including C. difficile, is governed by the key regulator for sporulation, Spo0A. In Bacillus subtilis, this transcription factor is also directly or indirectly involved in various other cellular processes. Here, we report that C. difficile Spo0A shows a high degree of similarity to the well characterized B. subtilis protein and recognizes a similar binding sequence. We find that the laboratory strain C. difficile 630Δerm contains an 18bp-duplication near the DNA-binding domain compared to its ancestral strain 630. In vitro binding assays using purified C-terminal DNA binding domain of the C. difficile Spo0A protein demonstrate direct binding to DNA upstream of spo0A and sigH, early sporulation genes and several other putative targets. In vitro binding assays suggest that the gene encoding the major clostridial toxin TcdB may be a direct target of Spo0A, but supernatant derived from a spo0A negative strain was no less toxic towards Vero cells than that obtained from a wild type strain, in contrast to previous reports. These results identify for the first time direct (putative) targets of the Spo0A protein in C. difficile and make a positive effect of Spo0A on production of the large clostridial toxins unlikely.
Inconsistency Management Policies

Though there is much work on how inconsistency in databases should be managed, there is good reason to believe that end users will want to bring their domain expertise and needs to bear in how to deal with inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose the concept of inconsistency management policies (IMPs). We show that IMPs are rich enough to specify many types of inconsistency management methods proposed previously, but provide end users with tools that allow them to use the policies that they want. Our policies are also capable of allowing inconsistency to persist in the database or of eliminating more than a minimal subset of tuples involved in the inconsistency. We present a formal axiomatic definition of IMPs and present appropriate complexity results, together with results linking different IMPs together. We extend the relational algebra (RA) to incorporate IMPs and present theoretical results showing how IMPs and classical RA operators interact.
A Quantitative Measure for Meal-Mate Social Capital Networks

This paper investigates meal-mate social network in terms of social capital. We propose a framework to quantitatively measure social capital and apply this framework to our dataset. Our measure is based on assumption that social capital is only related to the structure of the social capital network and we discuss the assumption on different scales of abstraction. We precisely define what we call "invested social capital"and"return of social capital" to characterize the bidirectional properties of a social capital network. It is found that invested social capital per edge is always greater than return of social capital per edge under certain conditions. The experimental results show that the females have larger social capital than the males in the network, where the number of men greatly exceeds the number of women. Also students with number of higher education study years possess more social capital in a general sense.
Vitamin C Protects Chondrocytes against Monosodium Iodoacetate-Induced Osteoarthritis by Multiple Pathways

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent joint disease. Dietary intake of vitamin C relates to a reduction in cartilage loss and OA. This study examined the efficacy of vitamin C to prevent OA with the in vitro chondrosarcoma cell line (SW1353) and the in vivo monosodium iodoacetate (MIA)-induced OA rat. Results demonstrated that, in SW1353 cells, treatment with 5 μM MIA inhibited cell growth and increased oxidative stress, apoptosis, and proteoglycan loss. In addition, the expression levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-17A, and TNF-α and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) MMP-1, MMP-3, and MMP-13 were increased. All of these MIA-induced changes could be prevented with treatment of 100 μM vitamin C. In an animal model, intra-articular injection of MIA-induced cartilage degradation resembled the pathological changes of OA, and treatment of vitamin C could lessen these changes. Unexpectedly, vitamin C’s effects did not strengthen with the increasing dosage, while the 100 mg/kg dosage was more efficient than the 200 or 300 mg/kg dosages. Vitamin C possessed multiple capacities for prevention of OA progress, including a decrease in apoptosis and in the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines and MMPs in addition to the well-known antioxidation.
Application of the Oral Minimal Model to Korean Subjects with Normal Glucose Tolerance and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Background The oral minimal model is a simple, useful tool for the assessment of β-cell function and insulin sensitivity across the spectrum of glucose tolerance, including normal glucose tolerance (NGT), prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in humans. Methods Plasma glucose, insulin, and C-peptide levels were measured during a 180-minute, 75-g oral glucose tolerance test in 24 Korean subjects with NGT (n=10) and T2DM (n=14). The parameters in the computational model were estimated, and the indexes for insulin sensitivity and β-cell function were compared between the NGT and T2DM groups. Results The insulin sensitivity index was lower in the T2DM group than the NGT group. The basal index of β-cell responsivity, basal hepatic insulin extraction ratio, and post-glucose challenge hepatic insulin extraction ratio were not different between the NGT and T2DM groups. The dynamic, static, and total β-cell responsivity indexes were significantly lower in the T2DM group than the NGT group. The dynamic, static, and total disposition indexes were also significantly lower in the T2DM group than the NGT group. Conclusion The oral minimal model can be reproducibly applied to evaluate β-cell function and insulin sensitivity in Koreans.
Feature and Decision Fusion based Facial Recognition in Challenging Environment

This paper introduces a face recognition system that contributes the feature and decision fusion in challenging environment. In this work, we investigate the proposed facial recognition system in typical office environments conditions. Though the traditional HMM based facial recognition system is very sensitive to the facial parameters variation, the proposed feature and decision fusion based face recognition is found to be stance and performs well for improving the robustness and naturalness of humancomputer-interaction. At first appearance and shape based features are extracted using Active Appearance Model and Active Shape Model. The other task combines appearance and shape based features that have been used by the multiple Discrete Hidden Markov Model classifiers with likelihood ratio based score fusion and majority voting method. The performances of all these unimodal and multi-modal system performance have been evaluated and compared with each other according to the VALID database. General Terms Face Recognition, Feature Fusion and Decision Fusion.
Practices influenced by policy? An exploration of newly hired science teachers at sites in South Africa and the United States

ABSTRACT In many parts of the world, newly hired science teachers’ practices are developing in a complex policy environment. However, little is known about how newly hired science teachers’ practices are enacted throughout a cycle of instruction and how these practices can be influenced by macro-, meso-, and micro-policies. Knowing how policies impact practice can result in better policies or better support for certain policies in order to enhance the instruction of newly hired teachers. This comparative study investigated how 12 newly hired science teachers at sites in South Africa (SA) and the United States (US) progressed through an instructional cycle of planning, teaching, and reflection. The qualitative data were analysed through beginning teacher competency frameworks, the cycle of instruction, and institutional theory. Data analysis revealed prevailing areas of practice and connections to levels of policy within the instructional cycle phases. There were some differences between the SA and US teachers and among first-, second-, and third-year teachers. More importantly, this study indicates that newly hired teachers are susceptible to micro-policies and are progressively developing their practice. It also shows the importance of meso-level connectors. It suggests that teacher educators and policy makers must consider how to prepare and support newly hired science teachers to achieve the shared global visions of science teaching.
Insecure Attachment Predicts History of Divorce, Marriage, and Current Relationship Status

ABSTRACT The goal of this research was to test the predictive ability of attachment styles and dysfunctional relational communication patterns to predict adults’ relationship status (i.e., single/partnered and ever-married/ever-divorced). Anxious and avoidant attachment styles and dysfunctional relational communication patterns (i.e., criticism, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling) were predictors of relationship status in 413 adults who participated in an online survey. The results indicated that anxious and avoidant attachment styles significantly predicted both history of divorce and single versus partnered relationship status. The dysfunctional communication patterns did not explain a great deal of variance in relationship history and status above and beyond insecure attachment, although dysfunctional communication was significantly and consistently associated with insecure attachment. These results indicate that some of the individual characteristics that generate a risk for divorce might also pose a barrier to repartnering after a divorce.
System-on-A-Chip Integration in the Semiconductor Industry: Industry Structure and Firm Strategies

Miniaturization has spurred ever-increasing on-chip integration in the semiconductor industry so that large-scale electronic systems can now be put on a single chip. The proliferation of such 'systems-on-a-chip' has important repercussions for the structure of the electronics industry, and the strategies of electronics firms. In a detailed case study, we apply a theoretical framework developed in Somaya and Teece ['Combining inventions in multi-invention contexts: organizational choices, intellectual property rights, and public policy,' SSRN Working Paper (available at: www.ssrn.com) 2001] to understand how system-on-a-chip integration is altering the balance between integrated approaches, components trading, and the licensing of 'design modules' (DM) in the semiconductor industry. Consistent with the framework, we observe a burgeoning market for licensed DMs in the industry, along with the primarily in-house design approach being pursued by large integrated firms. Important technical and institutional factors that are shaping industry structure, and the strategies being pursued by different types of firms are documented. Based on the framework, implications are drawn for firm strategy in response to technological shifts of the kind engendered by system-on-a-chip in the semiconductor industry. We extend the Somaya--Teece framework to include firm strategies that seek to influence the institutional environment in which they operate, and thus alter the balance between competing organizational modes. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.
Binding of the Lactococcal Drug Dependent Transcriptional Regulator LmrR to Its Ligands and Responsive Promoter Regions

The heterodimeric ABC transporter LmrCD from Lactococcus lactis is able to extrude several different toxic compounds from the cell, fulfilling a role in the intrinsic and induced drug resistance. The expression of the lmrCD genes is regulated by the multi-drug binding repressor LmrR, which also binds to its own promoter to autoregulate its own expression. Previously, we reported the crystal structure of LmrR in the presence and absence of the drugs Hoechst 33342 and daunomycin. Analysis of the mechanism how drugs control the repressor activity of LmrR is impeded by the fact that these drugs also bind to DNA. Here we identified, using X-ray crystallography and fluorescence, that riboflavin binds into the drug binding cavity of LmrR, adopting a similar binding mode as Hoechst 33342 and daunomycin. Microscale thermophoresis was employed to quantify the binding affinity of LmrR to its responsive promoter regions and to evaluate the cognate site of LmrR in the lmrCD promoter region. Riboflavin reduces the binding affinity of LmrR for the promoter regions. Our results support a model wherein drug binding to LmrR relieves the LmrR dependent repression of the lmrCD genes.
Folk psychology for human modelling: extending the BDI paradigm

BDI agents have been used with considerable success to model humans and create human-like characters in simulated environments. A key reason for this success is that the BDI paradigm is based in folk psychology, which means that the core concepts of the agent framework map easily to the language people use to describe their reasoning and actions in everyday conversation. However there are many generic aspects of human behaviour and reasoning that are not captured in the framework. While it is possible for the builder of a specific model or character to add these things to their model on a case by case basis, if many models are to be built it is highly desirable to integrate such generic aspects into the framework. This paper describes an approach to extending the BDI framework to create an enhanced framework for human modelling. It draws upon the folk psychological roots of the framework to create the extension, maintaining the mapping between the knowledge representation in the framework and the natural means of expressing expert knowledge. The application of this approach is illustrated with an extension to support human decision making.
Short Wavelength Infrared Face Recognition for Personalization

The paper describes an application of practical technologies to implement a low cost, consumer grade, single chip biometric system based on face recognition using infra-red imaging. The paper presents a system that consists of three stages that contribute in the face detection and recognition process. Each stage is explained with its individual contribution alongside results of tests performed for that stage. The system shows a high recognition rate when full frontal face images are led to the system. The paper further discusses the application based approach in the automotive world with plans for further study. Recognition rates of the overall system are also presented.
Copper-Containing Amine Oxidases and FAD-Dependent Polyamine Oxidases Are Key Players in Plant Tissue Differentiation and Organ Development

Plant polyamines are catabolized by two classes of amine oxidases, the copper amine oxidases (CuAOs) and the flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD)-dependent polyamine oxidases (PAOs). These enzymes differ to each other in substrate specificity, catalytic mechanism and subcellular localization. CuAOs and PAOs contribute to several physiological processes both through the control of polyamine homeostasis and as sources of biologically-active reaction products. CuAOs and PAOs have been found at high level in the cell-wall of several species belonging to Fabaceae and Poaceae families, respectively, especially in tissues fated to undertake extensive wall loosening/stiffening events and/or in cells undergoing programmed cell death (PCD). Apoplastic CuAOs and PAOs have been shown to play a key role as a source of H2O2 in light- or developmentally-regulated differentiation events, thus influencing cell-wall architecture and maturation as well as PCD. Moreover, growing evidence suggests a key role of intracellular CuAOs and PAOs in several facets of plant development. Here, we discuss recent advances in understanding the contribution of different CuAOs/PAOs, as well as their cross-talk with different intracellular and apoplastic metabolic pathways, in tissue differentiation and organ development.