Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptome analysis and molecular signature of human retinal pigment epithelium

Retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) is a polarized cell layer critical for photoreceptor function and survival. The unique physiology and relationship to the photoreceptors make the RPE a critical determinant of human vision. Therefore, we performed a global expression profiling of native and cultured human fetal and adult RPE and determined a set of highly expressed ‘signature’ genes by comparing the observed RPE gene profiles to the Novartis expression database (SymAtlas: http://wombat.gnf.org/index.html) of 78 tissues. Using stringent selection criteria of at least 10-fold higher expression in three distinct preparations, we identified 154 RPE signature genes, which were validated by qRT-PCR analysis in RPE and in an independent set of 11 tissues. Several of the highly expressed signature genes encode proteins involved in visual cycle, melanogenesis and cell adhesion and Gene ontology analysis enabled the assignment of RPE signature genes to epithelial channels and transporters (ClCN4, BEST1, SLCA20) or matrix remodeling (TIMP3, COL8A2). Fifteen RPE signature genes were associated with known ophthalmic diseases, and 25 others were mapped to regions of disease loci. An evaluation of the RPE signature genes in a recently completed AMD genomewide association (GWA) data set revealed that TIMP3, GRAMD3, PITPNA and CHRNA3 signature genes may have potential roles in AMD pathogenesis and deserve further examination. We propose that RPE signature genes are excellent candidates for retinal diseases and for physiological investigations (e.g. dopachrome tautomerase in melanogenesis). The RPE signature gene set should allow the validation of RPE-like cells derived from human embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells for cell-based therapies of degenerative retinal diseases.
The Third-Person Effect

A nationwide telephone survey of 721 adults examined the impact of the third-person effect on individuals' perceptions of the media's general influence and immorality effects with three issues. The third-person effect perceptual hypothesis predicts that individuals will perceive media messages to have greater effects on other people than on themselves. A behavioral hypothesis predicts that third-person perception (i.e., seeing others as more influenced) will lead to support for restrictions on media messages. The findings reaffirmed robust support for the perceptual hypothesis. Regarding the behavioral hypothesis, effect perceptions were found to be issue dependent. For television violence, the issue with the clearest moral dimension, perceived immorality effects predicted support for restrictions. In contrast, perception of the media's general influence was a key predictor of support for restrictions on televised trials and negative political advertising. The failure of past research to distinguish dimensions of perceived effects may account for the less than robust findings regarding the behavioral hypothesis.
A New Zamilon-like Virophage Partial Genome Assembled from a Bioreactor Metagenome

Virophages replicate within viral factories inside the Acanthamoeba cytoplasm, and decrease the infectivity and replication of their associated giant viruses. Culture isolation and metagenome analyses have suggested that they are common in our environment. By screening metagenomic databases in search of amoebal viruses, we detected virophage-related sequences among sequences generated from the same non-aerated bioreactor metagenome as recently screened by another team for virophage capsid-encoding genes. We describe here the assembled partial genome of a virophage closely related to Zamilon, which infects Acanthamoeba with mimiviruses of lineages B and C but not A. Searches for sequences related to amoebal giant viruses, other Megavirales representatives and virophages were conducted using BLAST against this bioreactor metagenome (PRJNA73603). Comparative genomic and phylogenetic analyses were performed using sequences from previously identified virophages. A total of 72 metagenome contigs generated from the bioreactor were identified as best matching with sequences from Megavirales representatives, mostly Pithovirus sibericum, pandoraviruses and amoebal mimiviruses from three lineages A–C, as well as from virophages. In addition, a partial genome from a Zamilon-like virophage, we named Zamilon 2, was assembled. This genome has a size of 6716 base pairs, corresponding to 39% of the Zamilon genome, and comprises partial or full-length homologs for 15 Zamilon predicted open reading frames (ORFs). Mean nucleotide and amino acid identities for these 15 Zamilon 2 ORFs with their Zamilon counterparts were 89% (range, 81–96%) and 91% (range, 78–99%), respectively. Notably, these ORFs included two encoding a capsid protein and a packaging ATPase. Comparative genomics and phylogenetic analyses indicated that the partial genome was that of a new Zamilon-like virophage. Further studies are needed to gain better knowledge of the tropism and prevalence of virophages in our biosphere and in humans.
CT and MRI in diseases of the aorta.

OBJECTIVE This review focuses on the role of CT and MRI in the diagnosis, follow-up, and surgical planning of aortic aneurysms and acute aortic syndromes, including aortic dissection, intramural hematoma, and penetrating aortic ulcer. It also provides a systematic approach to the definition, causes, natural history, and imaging principles of these diseases. CONCLUSION An understanding of the pathophysiology, natural history, and imaging features is the key to successful diagnosis and appropriate management of patients with these aortic diseases.
Weighted transformable spatial pyramid and scalable query for object retrieval

Object retrieval in the large-scale image corpus is an appealing, yet challenging task. Most of existing frameworks are based on bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) model. However, BoVW has an obvious drawback, i.e. lack of spatial information. In this paper, we propose weighted transformable spatial pyramid and scalable query for object retrieval. We first break the whole image into sub-images and then make these sub-images up in a new order in the final representation. Our method has two contributions: 1) relative spatial relationships of local features instead of absolute geometric layouts of features are encoded so that translation invariance is guaranteed, 2) scaling invariance in the image representation is ensured by scalable query. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms BoVW and traditional spatial pyramid matching.
Da Europa para a América: a trajetória do Movimento Olímpico brasileiro

Originados como um ritual em homenagem a Zeus, os Jogos Olimpicos foram recriado no final do seculo XIX e enfrentaram diversas dificuldades de estabelecimento ate conquistar a condicao de um dos principais fenomenos socioculturais contemporâneos. Atravessou o seculo XX acompanhando par e passo a dinâmica social e os interesses comerciais e politicos que foram sendo acoplados direta ou indiretamente ao universo esportivo. Nascido e desenvolvido na Europa foi conquistando adesoes em todos os continentes. Os atletas contemporâneos, que em principio tiveram sua condicao social e identidade associadas a amadores, amantes da pratica esportiva e representantes de um grupo social que se dedicava exclusivamente as realizacoes atleticas, viram esse papel ser alterado em funcao das transformacoes as quais os Jogos Olimpicos foram submetidos. O objetivo desse trabalho e apresentar a dinâmica do desenvolvimento do esporte e do movimento olimpico moderno e sua chegada ao continente americano, mais precisamente ao Brasil. Nesse processo fica evidenciado que mais que uma pratica ludica e amadora a implantacao e desenvolvimento tanto do esporte como do movimento olimpico tiveram um carater politico e comercial que foi ampliado ao longo de seus 108 anos de existencia.
Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation Open Access Infrared Thermography as an Access Pathway for Individuals with Severe Motor Impairments

Background: People with severe motor impairments often require an alternative access pathway, such as a binary switch, to communicate and to interact with their environment. A wide range of access pathways have been developed from simple mechanical switches to sophisticated physiological ones. In this manuscript we report the inaugural investigation of infrared thermography as a non-invasive and non-contact access pathway by which individuals with disabilities can interact and perhaps eventually communicate.
Parental Signal Indicating Significant State Change in Action Demonstration

This paper presents a new insight from a computational analysis of parental actions. Developmental behavioral studies have suggested that parental modifications in their actions directed to infants versus to adults may aid the infants’ processing of the actions. We have been analyzing parental actions using a bottom-up attention model so as to take the advantage in robot action learning. Our latest result indicates that parental social signals can be used for a robot to detect significant state changes in the demonstrated action.
Perceptual role taking and protodeclarative pointing in autism

In previous studies we have found that autistic children were severely impaired in conceptual role taking, that is, in their theory of mind. In this study we consider two possible precursors to this impairment, both of which are early interpersonal abilities. The first is perceptual role taking. A test of this revealed no impairment, ruling it out as related to the impairment in theory of mind. The second is pointing. This was shown to be abnormal, both in comprehension and production, relative to non-autistic controls. In particular, protodeclarative pointing was impaired whilst protoimperative pointing was not. The possibility that impaired protodeclarative pointing may be a precursor to autistic children's impaired theory of mind is discussed.
Competing Logics of Commemoration

Recent studies in collective memory point to the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. But these studies have yet to specify how cosmopolitan commemoration emerges and articulates with existing nationalist commemoration. To solve this problem, we examine the “history problem” between Japan and South Korea by focusing on how relevant political and civic actors negotiated cosmopolitanism and nationalism in commemorating Japan’s past colonial rule and wartime atrocities. In light of our historical analysis, we argue that a synthesis of theories of institutional logics and social movements is useful in illuminating how the emergence of cosmopolitan commemoration is embedded in specific networks of political and civic actors as mobilizing structures, and how the content and trajectory of its articulation with nationalist commemoration depends on political opportunities available to competing networks aligned differently with the two logics of commemoration.
Vitreoretinal lymphomas misdiagnosed as uveitis: Lessons learned from a case series

Purpose: To present challenging cases of vitreoretinal lymphoma (VRL) that was misdiagnosed as uveitis because of the apparent intraocular inflammation. At the light of the new classification of intraocular lymphomas, we detail the characteristics that masqueraded the tumors and the clinical aspects that guided us to the correct diagnosis. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the patients referred to our uveitis service between January 2006 and December 2014. Results: Seven patients referred with a presumptive diagnosis of idiopathic uveitis received a final diagnosis of VRL. The median time between the onset of symptoms and definitive diagnosis was 25 months for these complex cases. The median time from presentation at our clinic to final diagnosis was 1 month. The described clinical features including dense vitreous cells and subretinal infiltrates were characteristic and tend to be present in all these chronically ill patients. Vitreous samples were collected, and all demonstrated the pathognomonic tumor cells, the specific immunoglobulin heavy chain gene rearrangements, and an interleukin (IL)-10 to IL-6 ratio >1. Conclusion: VRLs are severe diseases with a poor prognosis that may be misdiagnosed as idiopathic inflammatory conditions of the eye. Treatment with steroids may occult the tumors and delay the correct diagnosis. Appropriate evaluation may prompt to a timely vitreous sampling and therefore to a faster diagnosis in these peculiar cases where the correct diagnosis was delayed by several months.
Supply voltage reduction in SRAMs: Impact on Static Noise Margins

Reducing leakage in memories is critical to reduce static power consumption in nanometric technologies. A wide-spread technique for reducing the leakage consists of lowering the supply voltage on the SRAM module. The paper investigates the effect of lowering the supply voltage on the robustness of a 6T SRAM cell, both in saturation and sub-threshold regimes. The static noise margin (SNM) is evaluated analytically and compared with HSPICE simulations for 130 nm, 90 nm and 65 nm Berkeley predictive technology models (BPTM) [9]. In addition, the impact of process variation is considered.
Bayesian smoothing and filtering for multiframe, multiaspect target detection and tracking

We introduce a new Bayesian algorithm for joint multiframe detection and tracking of multiaspect targets that move randomly in cluttered digital image sequences. Two versions of the algorithm are derived: a batch Bayes smoother and an on-line Bayes filter. Performance results with a simulated image sequence generated from real infrared airborne radar (IRAR) data show an improvement over the association of a bank of correlation detectors and a Kalman-Bucy tracker in a scenario with a heavily cluttered multiaspect target.
Race and party competition in Britain

List of figures List of maps List of tables Introduction Political consensus and the depoliticization of race Depoliticizing race locally: The role of community relations councils Ethnic-minority representation and local party competition: The case of Ealing Borough Race and the emergence of anti-consensus forces: Enoch Powell, the National Front, and the Anti-Nazi League The repoloticization of race Labour's non-white constituency Conclusions select bibliography, Index
Bilingual education in the 21st century: a global perspective

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Greedy Biomarker Discovery in the Genome with Applications to Antimicrobial Resistance

The Set Covering Machine (SCM) is a greedy learning algorithm that produces sparse classifiers. We extend the SCM for datasets that contain a huge number of features. The whole genetic material of living organisms is an example of such a case, where the number of feature exceeds 10^7. Three human pathogens were used to evaluate the performance of the SCM at predicting antimicrobial resistance. Our results show that the SCM compares favorably in terms of sparsity and accuracy against L1 and L2 regularized Support Vector Machines and CART decision trees. Moreover, the SCM was the only algorithm that could consider the full feature space. For all other algorithms, the latter had to be filtered as a preprocessing step.
Effects of Contextual Congruence in Advertising Execution: The Case of Japanese Culture-Bound Products

ABSTRACT The effects of congruence in advertising execution and relevance to the target audience were tested in a specific Japanese cultural context. An experiment was designed to test if significant differences existed between an advertisement for a traditional piece of clothing as modeled by a Japanese and an identical advertisement as modeled by a Westerner. The selected piece of clothing was a hakama often worn by Japanese female students to their graduation ceremonies. One hundred seventy-nine female university students completed a questionnaire and short interview concerning their reactions to one of the two rental hakama advertisements. Advertisement evaluations were measured using the affective, cognitive, and conative components of attitude. Significant differences in the affective dimension were found, confirming the impact of incongruent advertising execution. A stepwise binary logistic regression showed that the affective dimension was positively related to the Western model while the cognitive and the conative components were related to the Japanese model, thus confirming that incongruity led to greater effects on the affective component for the target audience. Japanese managers selling culture-bound products may use a Western model to attract attention, but are advised to use a Japanese model to increase understanding and buying intention.
Synthesis of gold nanoparticles using a vortex-type micro-mixing system

A new microfluidic reaction chip capable of mixing, transporting and reacting is developed for synthesis of gold nanoparticles with tunable sizes. It allows for a rapid and a cost-effective approach to accelerate the synthesis of gold nanoparticles. The microfluidic reaction chip was made of CNC machining and PDMS casting process to integrate a vortex-type micro-mixer and a micro-pump on a single chip. The micro-mixer is capable of generating a vortex-type flow field to achieve a mixing efficiency as high as 94% within 1 second. Successful synthesis of dispersed gold nanoparticles has been demonstrated within a shorter period of time (5 minutes), as compared to traditional methods. The dispersed gold nanoparticles had an average diameter of 17 nm, 23 nm and 48 nm, respectively. The size of the nanoparticles can be fine-tuned by using reagents with different volumes. The development of the microfluidic reaction system is promising for synthesis of functional nanoparticles for further biomedical applications.
Bilingual speech corpus in two phonetically similar languages

As Speech Recognition Systems improve, they become suitable for facingnew problems. Multilingual speech recognition is one such problems.In the present work, the case of the Comunitat Valenciana multilingual environment is studied.The official languages in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spanish and Valencian) share most of their acoustic units, and their vocabularies and syntax are quite similar.They have influenced each other for many years.A small corpus on an Information System task was developed for experimentationpurposes.This choice will make it possible to develop a working prototype in the future,and it is simple enough to build semi-automatic language models.The design of the acoustic corpus is discussed, showing that all combinations of accents have been studied (native, non-native speakers, male, female, etc.).
Equal Access but Unequal Outcomes: Cultural Capital and Educational Choice in a Meritocratic Society

This article argues that existing studies on cultural capital and educational success fail to distinguish the different channels through which cultural capital promotes educational success. Following Bourdieu, the article proposes that for cultural capital to promote educational success three conditions must hold: (1. parents must possess cultural capital, (2. they must transfer their cultural capital to children, and (3. children must absorb cultural capital and convert it into educational success. This research develops an empirical model that analyzes the significance of the three effects with respect to Danish children’s choice of secondary education. Denmark is well-suited for this study because access to secondary education is particularly meritocratic. The empirical analysis shows that all three channels through which cultural capital affects educational success are important.
Reception-Aware Routing for Energy Conservation in Ad Hoc Networks

Energy is a scarce resource in ad hoc mobile networks, making energy-aware communication crucial. In the absence of a central controlling entity and due to its dynamic network topology, the problem of controlling the network communications in an energy-efficient way is non-trivial in ad hoc networks. The problem is elevated due to the wireless nature of the communication, where a large amount of energy expenditure in the nodes is due to overhearing packets not meant for themselves. In this paper, we introduce battery-aware routing metrics which not only take care of the battery reserve in the nodes in the routes, but also the number of neighbors these nodes can potentially interfere, and the energy reserve of these neighbors, such that the energy due to overhearing is minimized throughout the network, specially when the neighbors are battery-deficient.
High Voltage-Boosting Converters Based on Bootstrap Capacitors and Boost Inductors

In this paper, novel high voltage-boosting converters are presented. By changing the connection position of the anode of the diode and by using different pulse-width-modulation control strategies, different voltage conversion ratios can be obtained. These converters are constructed based on bootstrap capacitors and boost inductors. Above all, two boost inductors with different values, connected in series, can still make the proposed converters work appropriately. Furthermore, although there are three switches in each converter, only one half-bridge gate driver and one low-side gate driver are needed, but no isolated gate driver would be needed. After some mathematical deductions, some experimental results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed converters.
THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN SLEEP DISTURBANCE: A COMPARISON OF JAPANESE AND ENGLISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The present study investigated the role of cognitive processes in the maintenance of clinically significant sleep disturbance across two cultures. A questionnaire was administered to 60 Japanese and 60 English university students to assess the presence of sleep disturbance, predominance of pre-sleep cognitive activity, use of thought management strategies to control pre-sleep cognitive activity, and the content of pre-sleep cognitive activity. The results indicated that across both cultures poor sleepers attributed their sleep disturbance to the presence of uncontrollable pre-sleep cognitive activity. Minor differences between the Japanese and English samples included the strategies employed to control pre-sleep cognitive activity. The English participants were more likely to engage in reappraisal whereas the Japanese sample were more likely to engage in punishment and worry. These results are suggestive of the cross-cultural applicability of cognitive models of insomnia.