Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantification of microvasculature in the canine spinal cord

Capillary density and capillary orientation in canine spinal cords were estimated by calculating actual lengths, surfaces, and volumes of capillary segments in tissue sections. Transverse, sagittal, and frontal section planes were sampled from dorsal, ventral, and lateral funiculi and from dorsal and ventral gray horns of spinal segments C3, T6, and L3 from three dogs. Capillaries were defined as vessels less than 10 μm in diameter. Electron microscopy of 104 such vessels revealed no muscle coat but collagen fibrils between endothelium and astrocyte process in 68% of the white matter capillaries and 16% of those in gray matter. Capillary diameter was significantly different among regions in some cases, but consistent patterns of variation were not found. Capillary density was four to five times greater in gray matter than in white matter. Capillary density differed significantly among the same‐size dogs, but within dogs, density was similar among segments and within gray matter and white matter regions. In 62% of the transverse sections, capillary orientation was significant but mean direction was variable. Significant capillary orientation was found in 89% of the sagittal and frontal sections, and the mean direction was always along the craniocaudal axis of the spinal cord. The craniocaudal orientation was significant in 96% of the white matter sections and 78% of the gray sections, and in 97% of the cervical and thoracic sections but only 73% of the lumbar sagittal and frontal sections.
Nuclear alpha spectrin: Critical roles in DNA interstrand cross-link repair and genomic stability

Non-erythroid alpha spectrin (αIISp) is a structural protein which we have shown is present in the nucleus of human cells. It interacts with a number of nuclear proteins such as actin, lamin, emerin, chromatin remodeling factors, and DNA repair proteins. αIISp’s interaction with DNA repair proteins has been extensively studied. We have demonstrated that nuclear αIISp is critical in DNA interstrand cross-link (ICL) repair in S phase, in both genomic (non-telomeric) and telomeric DNA, and in maintenance of genomic stability following ICL damage to DNA. We have proposed that αIISp acts as a scaffold aiding to recruit repair proteins to sites of damage. This involvement of αIISp in ICL repair and telomere maintenance after ICL damage represents new and critical functions for αIISp. These studies have led to development of a model for the role of αIISp in DNA ICL repair. They have been aided by examination of cells from patients with Fanconi anemia (FA), a repair-deficient genetic disorder in which a deficiency in αIISp leads to defective ICL repair in genomic and telomeric DNA, telomere dysfunction, and chromosome instability following DNA ICL damage. We have shown that loss of αIISp in FA cells is due to increased breakdown by the protease, µ-calpain. Importantly, we have demonstrated that this deficiency can be corrected by knockdown of µ-calpain and restoring αIISp levels to normal. This corrects a number of the phenotypic deficiencies in FA after ICL damage. These studies suggest a new and unexplored direction for therapeutically restoring genomic stability in FA cells and for correcting numerous phenotypic deficiencies occurring after ICL damage. Developing a more in-depth understanding of the importance of the interaction of αIISp with other nuclear proteins could significantly enhance our knowledge of the consequences of loss of αIISp on critical nuclear processes.
New Rat Model of Pneumocystis Pneumonia Induced by Anti-CD4+ T-Lymphocyte Antibodies

ABSTRACT The CD4+ T lymphocyte plays a central role in host defense against Pneumocystis pneumonia but has received only limited attention in rats. CD4+ T-cell-depleting (OX-38) and nondepleting (W3/25) monoclonal antibodies, which recognize an identical or adjacent epitope, were administered for up to 14 weeks to Lewis rats that had been exposed to Pneumocystis. While OX-38 produced a greater decrease in circulating CD4+ cells than W3/25, both antibody treatments resulted in similar effects on the health of the rats and the levels of Pneumocystis pneumonia, which were milder than those found with corticosteroids. W3/25 also did not enhance the severity of Pneumocystis pneumonia achieved with corticosteroids alone. We conclude that CD4+ cell function is more important than CD4+ cell number in host defense against Pneumocystis in the rat and that this new model permits study of opportunistic infections in the rat without the confounding effects of corticosteroids.
Decision Feedback Based Transceiver Optimization for MIMO Intersymbol Interference Channels

This paper deals with optimizing a transceiver, which consists of a linear time invariant (LTI) matrix filter at the transmitter and a decision feedback (DF) receiver, for single-carrier data transmission over multi-input multi-output (MIMO) intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. Considering a spatial multiplexing approach for transmission of multiple scalar substreams, we adopt some cost function f o({MSEi}) to measure the overall system performance, where MSEi's are the mean-squared errors (MSE) of the substreams. It is proven that for any cost function f o the optimum transmitter is of the same specific structure and the original complicated variational optimization problem can be drastically simplified to a problem with scalar variables. The solution can be further simplified if the cost function is specialized to the cases where the composite function f o diam exp is either Schur-convex or Schur-concave.
Data loss detector: automatically revealing data loss bugs in Android apps

Android apps must work correctly even if their execution is interrupted by external events. For instance, an app must work properly even if a phone call is received, or after its layout is redrawn because the smartphone has been rotated. Since these events may require destroying, when the execution is interrupted, and recreating, when the execution is resumed, the foreground activity of the app, the only way to prevent the loss of state information is to save and restore it. This behavior must be explicitly implemented by app developers, who often miss to implement it properly, releasing apps affected by data loss problems, that is, apps that may lose state information when their execution is interrupted. Although several techniques can be used to automatically generate test cases for Android apps, the obtained test cases seldom include the interactions and the checks necessary to exercise and reveal data loss faults. To address this problem, this paper presents Data Loss Detector (DLD), a test case generation technique that integrates an exploration strategy, data-loss-revealing actions, and two customized oracle strategies for the detection of data loss failures. DLD revealed 75% of the faults in a benchmark of 54 Android app releases affected by 110 known data loss faults, and also revealed unknown data loss problems, outperforming competing approaches.
The Effects of Student Activity Dashboards on Student Participation, Performance, and Persistence

Researchers have turned their attention to the use of learning analytics and dashboard systems in education. Schools are using knowledge gained in this area to address the issue of persistence to increase graduation rates. While dashboard systems have been developed and are starting to be implemented, it is not yet clear how activity and performance data from dashboards influences student behavior. In addition, much of the research has been focused on instructorfacing dashboards rather than student-facing dashboards. The current study implemented a student-facing dashboard in the learning management system and measured how information on the dashboard may have influenced participation in discussions, student performance on graded items, and persistence in future courses. A dashboard tool was developed for this study. Activity, performance, and persistence data was collected from all participating students. The study followed an experimental design approach that involved assigning a random group of students from multiple courses to a dashboard tool which showed the individual student’s activity and performance compared with that of their peers. Activity indicators included frequency of posting, average length of posts, percent of posts made to peers, and percent of posts made to instructor. The current score for the student, as a measure of performance, was also shown on the dashboard along with the current class average. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to determine whether there were statistically significant differences in participation as measured by number of posts, word count of posts, and percent of posts to peers or performance as measured by final grade. Chi Squared analysis was used to determine whether there were significant differences in persistence as a measure of whether students registered for and attended the following session. The analysis of results indicated no significant differences in participation or performance between the experimental and control groups (f(4, 59) = . 947, p = . 443). Similarly, no significant differences were found in persistence between the two groups (χ2(2) = . 960, p = . 619). Further research is needed to more fully understand the use of student dashboard interfaces and their impact on student behavior. Future studies using a similar methodology should incorporate larger sample sizes and include all students in the class, rather than using selfselected samples. A better understanding of how the use of dashboards influences participation, performance, and persistence is needed in order to develop effective strategies for supporting students.
Specific Detection, Isolation, and Characterization of Selected, Previously Uncultured Members of the Freshwater Bacterioplankton Community

ABSTRACT High-throughput cultivation was combined with rapid and group-specific phylogenetic fingerprinting in order to recover representatives of three freshwater bacterioplankton communities. A total of 570 bacterial cultures were obtained by employing the most probable number and MicroDrop techniques. The majority of the cultured bacteria were closely related to previously uncultured bacteria and grouped with the α-Proteobacteria, β-Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, or Flavobacteria-Cytophaga lineage. Correspondingly, the natural bacterioplankton community was analyzed by high-resolution phylogenetic fingerprinting of these five bacterial lineages. 16S rRNA gene fragments were generated for each lineage and subsequently separated by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis. By the combination of five group-specific PCR protocols, the total number of 16S rRNA gene fingerprints generated from the natural communities was increased sixfold compared to conventional (eubacterial) fingerprinting. Four of the environmental α-Proteobacteria 16S rRNA gene sequences obtained from the natural community were found to be identical to those of bacterial isolates. One of these phylotypes was detected in 14 different cultures and hence represented the most frequently cultured bacterium. Three of these 14 strains were characterized in detail. Their complete 16S rRNA gene sequences showed only 93% similarity to that of Sandaracinobacter sibiricus, the closest relative described so far. The novel phylotype of bacterium is a strict aerobe capable of using numerous organic carbon substrates and contains bacteriochlorophyll a bound to two different photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes. Dot blot hybridization revealed that the strains occur in lakes of different trophic status and constitute up to 2% of the microbial community.
Infectious Neuropathies

Purpose of Review: Infections are important, potentially treatable causes of peripheral nervous system disease. This article reviews the clinical presentation and management of several common peripheral nervous system diseases due to viral, bacterial, spirochetal, and parasitic infections. Recent Findings: The clinical presentation and evaluation of infectious peripheral nervous system diseases are well established. Advances in the treatment and, in some cases, the prevention of these diseases are still evolving. Summary: A diverse range of peripheral nervous system diseases, including peripheral neuropathy, radiculopathy, radiculomyelopathy, cranial neuropathy, and motor neuropathy, are caused by numerous infectious agents. In some patients, peripheral neuropathy may be a side effect of anti-infectious drugs. Infectious neuropathies are important to recognize as they are potentially treatable. This article discusses the clinical presentation, evaluation, and treatment of several common peripheral nervous system diseases caused by viral, bacterial, spirochetal, and parasitic infections, as well as some peripheral nerve disorders caused by adverse effects of the treatments of these infectious diseases.
Learning to detect table clones in spreadsheets

In order to speed up spreadsheet development productivity, end users can create a spreadsheet table by copying and modifying an existing one. These two tables share the similar computational semantics, and form a table clone. End users may modify the tables in a table clone, e.g., adding new rows and deleting columns, thus introducing structure changes into the table clone. Our empirical study on real-world spreadsheets shows that about 58.5% of table clones involve structure changes. However, existing table clone detection approaches in spreadsheets can only detect table clones with the same structures. Therefore, many table clones with structure changes cannot be detected. We observe that, although the tables in a table clone may be modified, they usually share the similar structures and formats, e.g., headers, formulas and background colors. Based on this observation, we propose LTC (Learning to detect Table Clones), to automatically detect table clones with or without structure changes. LTC utilizes the structure and format information from labeled table clones and non table clones to train a binary classifier. LTC first identifies tables in spreadsheets, and then uses the trained binary classifier to judge whether every two tables can form a table clone. Our experiments on real-world spreadsheets from the EUSES and Enron corpora show that, LTC can achieve a precision of 97.8% and recall of 92.1% in table clone detection, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art technique (a precision of 37.5% and recall of 11.1%).
NottReal: A Tool for Voice-based Wizard of Oz studies

We present NottReal, an application designed for simulating Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) in Wizard of Oz studies. We briefly discuss the premise and advantages of the Wizard of Oz method before moving onto introducing the design of the application, which we have iteratively developed and refined through a number of studies.
A Cloud-based Context-aware Framework for Assistive Healthcare

The research focuses on the development of a scalable context-aware framework for providing diversified assistive services in the aged healthcare domain. Here a generic model is proposed which will be a useful tool for numerous context-aware services integration in assisted eldercare. The goal of this research is to ease the daily lives of people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions. Assisted living system consists of multitudes sensors and ambient devices, generating large amount of high level contexts from medical and ambient data. Contexts are also obtained from different sources like activity histories of the patient. The observed contexts are then aggregated to deliver ondemand assistive services to the patient with the help of intelligent service management system. Traditional healthcare systems are limited in specific services and have low computational capability. The proposed cloud-based model seeks to address such issues and design a service oriented architecture (SOA) for abstract context model generation. The objective is to develop an ideal framework to support large number of assisted living systems together with wide range of services.
Peptidoglycan hydrolases as novel tool for anti-enterococcal therapy

Enterococci are representatives of Gram-positive lactic acid bacteria. Most of them are constituents of commensal microflora on human and animal mucous membranes, but some strains have emerged as a major cause of nosocomial infections especially due to the presence of multi-drug resistance. It is anticipated that soon enterococcal infections will be untreatable by current antibiotics, and alternative means of combating infections caused by these organisms will be urgently needed. Finding new, more efficient therapeutics is a big challenge for pharmaceutical industry. One of the most potential novel alternative to classic antibiotics are peptidoglycan hydrolases; enzymes degrading the major component of bacterial cell wall. Thanks to their common features bacteriolytic activity and narrow target spectrum, peptidoglycan hydrolases represent a safe tool for management of diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant enterococcal strains.
Spermatological Characters of Monozoic Tapeworms (Cestoda: Caryophyllidea), Including First Data on a Species from the Indomalayan Catfish

Abstract: The ultrastructure of spermiogenesis and mature spermatozoon in Lytocestus indicus (Cestoda: Lytocestidae) is described; this is the first representative of this group of monozoic, presumably most basal, tapeworms (Eucestoda) from the Indomalayan region to be documented in this manner. Similarly, as in other caryophyllideans, its spermiogenesis involves the formation of a conical differentiation zone with 2 centrioles associated with striated roots and an intercentriolar body. In the course of the process, 1 of the centrioles develops a free flagellum, which fuses with a cytoplasmic protrusion, whereas the other remains oriented in a cytoplasmic bud. Spermiogenesis is also characterized by the presence of electron-dense material in the early stages of spermiogenesis and a slight rotation of the flagellar bud. The mature spermatozoon of L. indicus is a filiform cell tapered at both extremities that lacks mitochondria; its nucleus has parallel disposition to the axoneme and does not reach up to the posterior extremity of the spermatozoon, which is typical for spermatozoa of the type III pattern. The new data confirm that caryophyllideans share the same type of spermiogenesis that is considered to be plesiomorphic in the Eucestoda. The existing information on spermatological ultrastructure of 8 members for 3 of 4 caryophyllidean families from different host groups (cyprinids and catostomids, both Cypriniformes, and mochokids and clariids, both Siluriformes) from 4 zoogeographical regions (Palearctic, Neotropic, Ethiopian, and Indomalayan regions) demonstrates great uniformity in spermiogenesis and sperm ultrastructure, which does not reflect different taxonomic position of the species studied.
The Varieties of Understanding: English Philosophy since 1898

Contents: The aim of the book is to reveal the 'deep grammar' of analytical philosophy as it was practised in England by its historically acting leaders: Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Wisdom, Ryle, Austin, Strawson and Dummett - The philosophy of each one of them is examined in a separate chapter - The method followed is exhaustive analysis of their texts.
Effect of matrix chain length on the electrophoretic mobility of large linear and branched DNA in polymer solutions

We study the effect of matrix chain molecular weight Mw and concentration c on the electrophoretic mobility μ of large linear and star‐like, branched DNA in polymer solutions. Polyethylene oxide (PEO) with narrow molecular weight distributions form the main focus of this study. For PEO concentrations ranging from one half the overlap concentration, c*, to 3c*, the effective drag coefficient, ζ $\equiv {{\mu _0 } \over \mu } - 1$, satisfies the following approximate scaling relationship, ζ $\sim cM_w^{0.7}$ . Here, μ0 is the electrophoretic mobility in free solution. While the concentration dependence is consistent with predictions from the transient entanglement coupling (TEC) model, the molecular weight dependence is significantly weaker. Although a similar dependence of mobility on Mw can be predicted when nonentangling collisions are the dominant source of drag, a model based on these collisions alone cannot reproduce the experimental observations. We also find that the architecture of large DNA does not affect either the concentration dependence or molecular weight dependence of the electrophoretic mobility.
Identification of two arylalkylamine N‐acetyltranferase 1 genes with different developmental expression profiles in the flatfish Solea senegalensis

Abstract: The existence of two arylalkylamine N‐acetyltransferase 1 (Aanat1) genes in the genome of some teleosts has been reported recently by in silico analysis. However, there are no data concerning the similarities and/or differences between them and many questions remain to be answered, such as their expression sites, development, or kinetics. Here, we report the cloning of Aanat1a and Aanat1b cDNAs from the sole retina and show for the first time that at least three Aanat genes are expressed in a vertebrate species. Because melatonin is involved in fish ontogeny, we analyzed the developmental transcript levels of Aanat1a and Aanat1b by quantitative real‐time PCR, showing their inverse and stage‐specific expression patterns. Aanat1a was more abundant during early than late larval stages. Before metamorphosis, nocturnal expression was higher. At metamorphosis, Aanat1a expression decreased and lost these day–night variations. In contrast, the abundance of Aanat1b transcripts, low during early developing stages, rose significantly throughout metamorphosis. This situation seemed to apply to the adult because Aanat1a expression was lower than Aanat1b expression in the retina of adults, where the former did not exhibit day–night variations, while the latter did so with much higher nocturnal transcript levels. In situ hybridization analysis detected Aanat1a and Aanat1b messengers in the outer and inner nuclear layers of retina. The differences in abundance and distinct day–night expression patterns between Aanat1a and Aanat1b during sole development suggest different functions for these two enzymes as well as the existence of interactions between the melatoninergic and thyroid hormone systems during flatfish metamorphosis.