Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BimS-induced apoptosis requires mitochondrial localization but not interaction with anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins

Release of apoptogenic proteins such as cytochrome c from mitochondria is regulated by pro- and anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, with pro-apoptotic BH3-only proteins activating Bax and Bak. Current models assume that apoptosis induction occurs via the binding and inactivation of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins by BH3-only proteins or by direct binding to Bax. Here, we analyze apoptosis induction by the BH3-only protein BimS. Regulated expression of BimS in epithelial cells was followed by its rapid mitochondrial translocation and mitochondrial membrane insertion in the absence of detectable binding to anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins. This caused mitochondrial recruitment and activation of Bax and apoptosis. Mutational analysis of BimS showed that mitochondrial targeting, but not binding to Bcl-2 or Mcl-1, was required for apoptosis induction. In yeast, BimS enhanced the killing activity of Bax in the absence of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins. Thus, cell death induction by a BH3-only protein can occur through a process that is independent of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins but requires mitochondrial targeting.
Human perception inspired exposure correction using total variation model

We present the framework for the exposure correction and back-light compensation using the bilateral logarithm total variation model based on human perception called HPEC. The method aims to emulate the way in which the human visual system discriminates original color in dim light or shadow region with rod, cone and light adaptation. The proposed method is effective for appropriate illumination and vivid color restoration, suppression of artifacts such as, color distortion, HALO and noise amplification as well as automatic parameter estimation by the image statistics analysis.
Evidence against a pressor role for vasopressin in spontaneous hypertension.

The hypothesis that the vasoconstrictor action of vasopressin may contribute to the development of hypertension in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) was tested by chronic infusion of a specific antagonist of the vascular effects of vasopressin. From 4 to 13 weeks of age, SHR and Wistar-Kyoto rats (WKY) received subcutaneously either isotonic saline or the vasopressin pressor antagonist, d(CH2)5Tyr(Me)arginine vasopressin by osmopump. Systolic blood pressure was measured by tail cuff from 5 to 11 weeks of age. In SHR, the vasopressin analogue did not alter the rate or magnitude of increase in systolic blood pressure. In WKY, systolic blood pressure in the vasopressin analogue group was slightly reduced compared with the saline infusion values until 10 weeks of age (F1, 10 = 10.18, p = 0.008). At 12 to 14 weeks of age, all animals were prepared with indwelling arterial and venous catheters. Resting mean arterial pressure was not altered significantly by the vasopressin analogue infusion in either strain, but the response to an acute vasopressin infusion of 5, 15, or 50 ng/kg body weight was markedly attenuated by the analogue treatment, indicating that plasma levels of the vasopressin analogue were sufficient to block pressor effects of endogenous vasopressin. A bolus injection of the angiotensin II converting enzyme inhibitor teprotide (SQ 20881) resulted in a decrease in mean arterial pressure (p less than 0.05) that was comparable in all groups, and serum renin concentration was not elevated in the vasopressin analogue-treated rat. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Cognitive Correlates of Perseverations in Individuals with Memory Impairment

Objective This study examines which cognitive measure best accounts for perseverations in individuals with memory impairment. Method The sample included 85 individuals, of whom 21 had subjective memory concerns, 27 had mild cognitive impairment, and 37 had Alzheimer's disease. Participants produced responses on a semantic category fluency task and on the ideational fluency (IF) task from the Cambridge Cognitive Examination-Revised. Measures of word finding, working memory, and abstract thinking were also assessed. Results Significant group differences in percentage of perseverations emerged on both tasks. No cognitive measure accounted for the percentage of perseverations on the semantic fluency task. A measure of abstract thinking was the best predictor of the percentage of perseverations on the IF task, followed by a measure of working memory. Conclusions The underlying cognitive mechanisms that lead to perseverations differ across tasks, with perseverations on the IF task reflecting both conceptual deficits and working memory limitations.
Ultrasmall, water dispersible, TWEEN80 modified Yb:Er:NaGd(WO4)2 nanoparticles with record upconversion ratiometric thermal sensitivity and their internalization by mesenchymal stem cells

This work presents the synthesis by coprecipitation of diamond shaped Yb:Er:NaGd(WO4)2 crystalline nanoparticles (NPs) with diagonal dimensions in the 5–7 nm × 10–12 nm range which have been modified with TWEEN80 for their dispersion in water, and their interaction with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) proposed as cellular NP vehicles. These NPs belong to a large family of tetragonal Yb:Er:NaT(XO4)2 (T = Y, La, Gd, Lu; X = Mo, W) compounds with green (2H11/2 + 4S3/2 → 4I15/2) Er-related upconversion (UC) efficiency comparable to that of Yb:Er:β-NaYF4 reference compound, but with a ratiometric thermal sensitivity (S) 2.5–3.5 times larger than that of the fluoride. At the temperature range of interest for biomedical applications (∼293–317 K/20–44 °C) S = 108–118 × 10−4 K−1 for 20 at%Yb:5 at%Er:NaGd(WO4)2 NPs, being the largest values so far reported using the 2H11/2/4S3/2 Er intensity ratiometric method. Cultured MSCs, incubated with these water NP emulsions, internalize and accumulate the NPs enclosed in endosomes/lysosomes. Incubations with up to 10 μg of NPs per ml of culture medium maintain cellular metabolism at 72 h. A thermal assisted excitation path is discussed as responsible for the UC behavior of Yb:Er:NaT(XO4)2 compounds.
Random forests for dura mater microvasculature segmentation using epifluorescence images

Automatic segmentation of microvascular structures is a critical step in quantitatively characterizing vessel remodeling and other physiological changes in the dura mater or other tissues. We developed a supervised random forest (RF) classifier for segmenting thin vessel structures using multiscale features based on Hessian, oriented second derivatives, Laplacian of Gaussian and line features. The latter multiscale line detector feature helps in detecting and connecting faint vessel structures that would otherwise be missed. Experimental results on epifluorescence imagery show that the RF approach produces foreground vessel regions that are almost 20 and 25 percent better than Niblack and Otsu threshold-based segmentations respectively.
Flexible Convolutional Codes: Variable Rate and Complexity

In this study, a method is presented for constructing convolutional codes of variable rate and decoding complexity. Starting with an (n,1,m) mother code, the techniques of puncturing and path pruning are utilized in order to construct large families of convolutional codes of various code rates and complexity. Decoding is performed using the trellis of the mother code.
Development and Alignment of a Domain-Specific Ontology for Question Answering

With the appearance of Semantic Web technologies, it becomes possible to develop novel, sophisticated question answering systems, where ontologies are usually used as the core knowledge component. In the EU-funded project, QALL-ME, a domain-specific ontology was developed and applied for question answering in the domain of tourism, along with the assistance of two upper ontologies for concept expansion and reasoning. This paper focuses on the development of the QALL-ME ontology in the tourism domain and its alignment with the upper ontologies - WordNet and SUMO. The design of the ontology is presented in the paper, and a semi-automatic alignment procedure is described with some alignment results given as well. Furthermore, the aligned ontology was used to semantically annotate original data obtained from the tourism web sites and natural language questions. The storage schema of the annotated data and the data access method for retrieving answers from the annotated data are also reported in the paper.
Gene expression profiling signatures for the diagnosis and prevention of oral cavity carcinogenesis-genome-wide analysis using RNA-seq technology

We compared the changes in global gene expression between an early stage (the termination of the carcinogen treatment and prior to the appearance of frank tumors) and a late stage (frank squamous cell carcinoma (SCC)) of tongue carcinogenesis induced by the carcinogen 4-nitroquinoline 1-oxide (4-NQO) in a mouse model of human oral cavity and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Gene ontology and pathway analyses show that increases in “cell cycle progression” and “degradation of basement membrane and ECM pathways” are early events during SCC carcinogenesis and that changes in these pathways are even greater in the actual tumors. Myc, NFκB complex (NFKB1/RELA), and FOS transcription networks are the major transcriptional networks induced in early stage tongue carcinogenesis. Decreases in metabolism pathways, such as in “tricarboxylic acid cycle” and “oxidative phosphorylation”, occurred only in the squamous cell carcinomas and not in the early stages of carcinogenesis. We detected increases in ALDH1A3, PTGS2, and KRT1 transcripts in both the early and late stages of carcinogenesis. The identification of the transcripts and pathways that change at an early stage of carcinogenesis provides potentially useful information for early diagnosis and for prevention strategies for human tongue squamous cell carcinomas.
Pattern Analysis and Signature Extraction for Intrusion Attacks on Web Services

The increasing popularity of web service technology is attracting hackers and attackers to hack the web services and the servers on which they run. Organizations are therefore facing the challenge of implementing adequate security for Web Services. A major threat is that of intruders which may maliciously try to access the data or services. The automated methods of signature extraction extract the binary pattern blindly resulting in more false positives. In this paper a semi automated approach is proposed to analyze the attacks and generate signatures for web services. For data collection, apart from the conventional SOAP data loggers, honeypots are also used that collect small data which is of high value. To filter out the most suspicious part of the data, SVM based classifier is employed to aid the system administrator. By applying an attack signature algorithm on the filtered data, a more balanced attack signature is extracted that results in fewer false positives and negatives. It helps the Security Administrator to identify the web services that are vulnerable or are attacked more frequently.
What’s Better—R, SAS®, SPSS®, or Stata®? Thoughts for Instructors of Statistics and Research Methods Courses

Knowledge of statistical software is an important skill for undergraduate sociology students to possess when seeking postgraduation employment; however, formal discussion of which software may be most beneficial to students and appealing to potential employers is lacking. The author’s goal in this teaching note is to provide the strengths and limitations of R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata software in a succinct and nontechnical manner, and discuss how these differences may influence an undergraduate instructor’s consideration of choosing which software is best for his or her statistics or research methods course. On reviewing these differences, the author argues that in most situations SAS would be the preferred software to use in one’s undergraduate course. However, there could be certain situations where R, SPSS, or Stata may be the preferred software. By giving consideration to the differences in these software packages, instructors can make an informed decision as to which is best for their course.
Event-Based Method for Instantaneous Fundamental Frequency Estimation from Voiced Speech Based on Eigenvalue Decomposition of the Hankel Matrix

We propose a robust event-based method for estimation of the instantaneous fundamental frequency of a voiced speech signal. The amplitude and frequency modulated (AM-FM) signal model of voiced speech in the low frequency range (LFR) indicates the presence of energy only around its instantaneous fundamental frequency ( F0) and its few harmonics. The time-varying F0 component of a voiced speech signal is extracted by a robust algorithm which iteratively performs eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) of the Hankel matrix, initially constructed from samples of the LFR filtered voiced speech signal. The negative cycles of the extracted time-varying F0 component provide a reliable coarse estimate of intervals where glottal closure instants (GCIs) may be present. The negative cycles of the LFR filtered voiced speech signal occurring within these intervals are isolated. There is a sudden decrease in the glottal impedance at GCIs resulting in high signal strength. Therefore, GCIs are detected as local minima in the derivative of the falling edges of the isolated negative cycles of the LFR filtered voiced speech signal, followed by a selection criterion to discard false GCI candidates. The instantaneous F0 is estimated as the inverse of the time interval between two consecutive GCIs. Experiments were performed on the Keele and CSTR speech databases in white and babble noise environments at various levels of degradation to assess the performance of the proposed method. The proposed method substantially reduces the gross F0 estimation errors in comparison to some state of the art methods.
Performance bounds for vector quantized compressive sensing

In this paper, we endeavor for predicting the performance of quantized compressive sensing under the use of sparse reconstruction estimators. We assume that a high rate vector quantizer is used to encode the noisy compressive sensing measurement vector. Exploiting a block sparse source model, we use Gaussian mixture density for modeling the distribution of the source. This allows us to formulate an optimal rate allocation problem for the vector quantizer. Considering noisy CS quantized measurements, we analyze upper- and lower-bounds on reconstruction error performance guarantee of two estimators - convex relaxation based basis pursuit de-noising estimator and an oracle-assisted least-squares estimator.
Enigma Catalyst : A machine-based investing platform and infrastructure for crypto-assets

Inspired by the rapid growth and proliferation of crypto-assets, we propose Catalyst – the first investment platform that enables developers to build, test, and execute micro crypto-funds. Through Catalyst, developers can access Enigma’s decentralized data marketplace protocol [15] and consume valuable crypto-data that can be used in their strategies. Catalyst is therefore the first application to be deployed on top of the Enigma protocol.
Multi-Channel Assignmentment for Heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-channel assignment schemes have recently been proposed to improve the network throughput of multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In these schemes, channel coordination is done either through time synchronization across all the nodes, or through the use of a dedicated channel for the transmission of necessary control messages. Either way, excessive system overhead or waste of bandwidth resource becomes inevitable and undermines the overall network throughput. To resolve these problems, we consider the heterogeneity in large-scale networks and propose a synchronization-free, hybrid temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment scheme. The gateway is allowed to switch its radios to all the available channels sequentially in a round-robin fashion. This temporal channel assignment approach ensures that all the neighboring nodes that communicate with the gateway directly shall have a fair access to the gateway. The channel assignment for the remaining wireless nodes is based on the geographical location and channel/radio availability (a spatial approach) to avoid the interface during the transmission period. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve the network throughput substantially with the acceptable collision ratio. Keywords-wireless mesh networks (WMNs); multi-channel; throughput; temporal; spatial; heterogeneous
Rematch and forward for parallel relay networks

The Gaussian parallel relay network problem consists of transmitting a message from a single source node to a single destination node, through a layer of parallel relay nodes. The source is connected to the relays by a Gaussian broadcast channel, while the relays are connected to the destination by a Gaussian multiple access channel. When the channels are all white with the same bandwidth, and the relays cannot decode the message, the best known strategy is "amplify and forward", which achieves the coherence gain of multiple relays. We propose a strategy which achieves this gain even when the noises are colored or the channels have different bandwidths. To that end we use analog modulo-lattice modulation of the codewords in the BC, and then forward the estimated codeword by each of the relays to the MAC. This modulation allows the relays to re-match the signal to the optimal spectrum of the MAC, thus demonstrating how a channel problem can gain from a joint source/channel approach. We show that this strategy is asymptotically optimal in some limiting cases, and that it outperforms the known alternatives in most other cases, where the optimum is unknown. We also demonstrate how to improve the achievable rate in the original white problem, for some signal to noise ratio values.
The Attributions Of Academic And Co-Curricular Success Of Malay And Chinese Students In Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

This study attempts to identify and classify the attributes of academic success and determine the differences of these attributes among high-achieving Malay students and their Chinese peers with equivalent achievements, and low-achieving Malay students with high-achieving Malay students. For the purpose of this study, 20 Malay students and 20 Chinese students were made subjects of the research. From the study, a total of 15 attributes to success were identified, among which included perspective towards studies, study methodology, lecturers’ demeanor and approach, financial status and fluency in English. Aside from these, ten of the attributes were found to differ for students whose achievement can be attributed to ethnicity and eight different attributes for Malay and Chinese students based on academic prowess and accomplishment.
TripleBeat: enhancing exercise performance with persuasion

We present TripleBeat, a mobile phone based system that assists runners in achieving predefined exercise goals via musical feedback and two persuasive techniques: a glanceable interface for increased personal awareness and a virtual competition. TripleBeat is based on a previous system named MPTrain. First, we describe TripleBeat's hardware and software, emphasizing how it differs from its predecessor MPTrain. Then, we present the results of a runner study with 10 runners. The study compared the runners efficacy and enjoyment in achieving predefined workout goals when running with MPTrain and TripleBeat. The conclusions from the study include: (1) significantly higher efficacy and enjoyment with TripleBeat, and (2) a unanimous preference for TripleBeat over MPTrain. The glanceable interface and the virtual competition are the two main reasons for the improvements in the running experience. We believe that systems like TripleBeat will play an important role in enhancing the exercise experience and in assisting users towards more active lifestyles.
The Presumed Influence of Attention on Accuracy in the Developmental Eye Movement (DEM) Test

Background The developmental eye movement (DEM) test is a clinical test used widely to evaluate ocular motility function (accuracy and speed) in school-age children. Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate, retrospectively, the change in accuracy over time while performing the DEM horizontal reading task in children. Methods The charts from children who had performed the DEM test during a routine eye examination in a pediatric optometry service were reviewed. The study included 22 patients (6 to 11 years old, 12 boys, 10 girls) who had a routine eye examination that was precepted by one of the authors (R.C.) during the period of 1995 to 1999. Patients were divided into two categories: 1) those with abnormal DEM test results and 2) a control group consisting of those with normal DEM test results. Chart review was done consecutively within each category. Collected data included patient age, gender, refractive error, and DEM test results. For analysis, the horizontal task of the DEM was divided into two halves (I and II), Part I always preceded part II, and data was sorted as the number of errors per part. Results More errors in accuracy occurred in part II than in part I (Wilcoxon signed rank test, p ≤ 0.01) of the horizontal DEM test in the group of subjects with an abnormal DEM test. No differences in the number of errors in parts I and II of the horizontal task of the DEM were found in the control group. Conclusions Findings showed that when excessive errors in accuracy occurred, the number of errors increased over time. If the errors were caused by an oculomotor dysfunction found in the DEM, errors should be equally distributed throughout the text. If errors were caused by fatigue, a difference in parts I and II should have occurred in both the test and the control group. These findings suggest that attention may influence accuracy over time in those patients that do poorly on the DEM test.
ISART: A Generic Framework for Searching Books with Social Information

Effective book search has been discussed for decades and is still future-proof in areas as diverse as computer science, informatics, e-commerce and even culture and arts. A variety of social information contents (e.g, ratings, tags and reviews) emerge with the huge number of books on the Web, but how they are utilized for searching and finding books is seldom investigated. Here we develop an Integrated Search And Recommendation Technology (IsArt), which breaks new ground by providing a generic framework for searching books with rich social information. IsArt comprises a search engine to rank books with book contents and professional metadata, a Generalized Content-based Filtering model to thereafter rerank books with user-generated social contents, and a learning-to-rank technique to finally combine a wide range of diverse reranking results. Experiments show that this technology permits embedding social information to promote book search effectiveness, and IsArt, by making use of it, has the best performance on CLEF/INEX Social Book Search Evaluation datasets of all 4 years (from 2011 to 2014), compared with some other state-of-the-art methods.