Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Archvillin, a muscle-specific isoform of supervillin, is an early expressed component of the costameric membrane skeleton

The membrane skeleton protein supervillin binds tightly to both F-actin and membranes and can potentiate androgen receptor activity in non-muscle cells. We report that muscle, which constitutes the principal tissue source for supervillin sequences, contains a ∼250 kDa isoform of supervillin that localizes within nuclei and with dystrophin at costameres, regions of F-actin membrane attachment in skeletal muscle. The gene encoding this protein, `archvillin' (Latin, archi; Greek, árchos; `principal' or `chief'), contains an evolutionarily conserved, muscle-specific 5′ leader sequence. Archvillin cDNAs also contain four exons that encode ∼47 kDa of additional muscle-specific protein sequence in the form of two inserts within the function-rich N-terminus of supervillin. The first of these muscle-specific inserts contains two conserved nuclear targeting signals in addition to those found in sequences shared with supervillin. Archvillin, like supervillin, binds directly to radiolabeled F-actin and co-fractionates with plasma membranes. Colocalization of archvillin with membrane-associated actin filaments, non-muscle myosin II, and – to a lesser extent – vinculin was observed in myoblasts. Striking localizations of archvillin protein and mRNA were observed at the tips of differentiating myotubes. Transfected protein chimeras containing archvillin insert sequences inhibited myotube formation, consistent with a dominant-negative effect during early myogenesis. These data suggest that archvillin is among the first costameric proteins to assemble during myogenesis and that it contributes to myogenic membrane structure and differentiation.
Towards attentive robots

This paper introduces Atentive Robots: robots that attend to the parts of their sensory input that are currently of most potential interest. The concept of selecting the most promising parts is adopted from human perception where selective attention allocates the brain resources to the most interesting parts of the sensory input. We give an overview of current approaches to integrate computational attention into robotic systems, with a focus on biologically-inspired visual attention methods. Example applications range from localization with salient landmarks over object manipulation to the design of social robots. A brief outlook gives an impression of how future ways to obtain attentive robots might look like.
The Positive Predictive Value for Diagnosis of Breast Cancer : Full-Field Digital Mammography Versus Film-Screen Mammography in the Diagnostic Mammographic Population 1

Rationale and Objectives. Diagnostic mammography is performed on women with clinical symptoms that suggest breast cancer or women for whom further mammographic evaluation has been requested because of an abnormal screening mammography. We assessed whether the use of full-field digital mammography would improve the positive predictive value (PPV) for the diagnosis of breast cancer in a diagnostic population compared with film-screen mammography.
Impedance control for variable stiffness mechanisms with nonlinear joint coupling

The current discussion on physical human robot interaction and the related safety aspects, but also the interest of neuro-scientists to validate their hypotheses on human motor skills with bio-mimetic robots, led to a recent revival of tendon-driven robots. In this paper, the modeling of tendon-driven elastic systems with nonlinear couplings is recapitulated. A control law is developed that takes the desired joint position and stiffness as input. Therefore, desired motor positions are determined that are commanded to an impedance controller. We give a physical interpretation of the controller. More importantly, a static decoupling of the joint motion and the stiffness variation is given. The combination of active (controller) and passive (mechanical) stiffness is investigated. The controller stiffness is designed according to the desired overall stiffness. A damping design of the impedance controller is included in these considerations. The controller performance is evaluated in simulation.
Penny Wise, Dollar Foolish: Buy-Sell Imbalances On and Around Round Numbers

This paper provides evidence that stock traders focus on round numbers as cognitive reference points for value. Using a random sample of more than 100 million stock transactions, we find excess buying (selling) by liquidity demanders at all price points one penny below (above) round numbers. Further, the size of the buy--sell imbalance is monotonic in the roundness of the adjacent round number (i.e., largest adjacent to integers, second-largest adjacent to half-dollars, etc.). Conditioning on the price path, we find much stronger excess buying (selling) by liquidity demanders when the ask falls (bid rises) to reach the integer than when it crosses the integer. We discuss and test three explanations for these results. Finally, 24-hour returns also vary by price point, and buy--sell imbalances are a major determinant of that variation across price points. Buying (selling) by liquidity demanders below (above) round numbers yield losses approaching $1 billion per year. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.
Session Initiation Protocol Service Examples

This document gives examples of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) services. This covers most features offered in so-called IP Centrex offerings from local exchange carriers and PBX (Private Branch Exchange) features. Most of the services shown in this document are implemented in the SIP User Agents, although some require the assistance of a SIP Proxy. Some require some extensions to SIP including the REFER, SUBSCRIBE, and NOTIFY methods and the Replaces and Join header fields. These features are not intended to be an exhaustive set, but rather show implementations of common features likely to be implemented on SIP IP telephones in a business environment.
Church Encoding of Data Types Considered Harmful for Implementations: Functional Pearl

From the λ-calculus it is known how to represent (recursive) data structures by ordinary λ-terms. Based on this idea one can represent algebraic data types in a functional programming language by higher-order functions. Using this encoding we only have to implement functions to achieve an implementation of the functional language with data structures. In this paper we compare the famous Church encoding of data types with the less familiar Scott and Parigot encodings. We show that one can use the encoding of data types by functions in a Hindley-Milner typed language by adding a single constructor for each data type. In an untyped context, like an efficient implementation, this constructor can be omitted. By collecting the basic operations of a data type in a type constructor class and providing instances for the various encodings, these encodings can co-exist in a single program. By changing the instance of this class we can execute the same algorithm in a different encoding. This makes it easier to compare the encodings with each other. We show that in the Church encoding selectors of constructors yielding the recursive type, like the tail of a list, have an undesirable strictness in the spine of the data structure. The Scott and Parigot encodings do not hamper lazy evaluation in any way. The evaluation of the recursive spine by the Church encoding makes the complexity of these destructors linear time. The same destructors in the Scott and the Parigot encoding requires only constant time. Moreover, the Church encoding has problems with sharing reduction results of selectors. The Parigot encoding is a combination of the Scott and Church encoding. Hence we might expect that it combines the best of both worlds, but in practice it does not offer any advantage over the Scott encoding.
Speech acoustic unit segmentation using hierarchical dirichlet processes

Speech recognition systems have historically used context-dependent phones as acoustic units because these units allow linguistic information, such as a pronunciation lexicon, to be leveraged. However, when dealing with a new language for which minimal linguistic resources exist, it is desirable to automatically discover acoustic units. The process of discovering acoustic units usually consists of two stages: segmentation and clustering. In this paper, we focus on the segmentation portion of this problem. We introduce a nonparametric Bayesian approach for segmentation, based on Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP), in which a hidden Markov model (HMM) with an unbounded number of states is used to segment the utterance. This model is referred to as an HDP-HMM. We compare this algorithm to several popular heuristic methods and demonstrate an 11% improvement in finding boundaries on the TIMIT Corpus. A self-similarity measure over segments shows an 88% improvement compared to manual segmentation with comparable segment length. This work represents the first step in the development of a speech recognition system that is entirely based on nonparametric Bayesian models.
Privacy-aware image classification and search

Modern content sharing environments such as Flickr or YouTube contain a large amount of private resources such as photos showing weddings, family holidays, and private parties. These resources can be of a highly sensitive nature, disclosing many details of the users' private sphere. In order to support users in making privacy decisions in the context of image sharing and to provide them with a better overview on privacy related visual content available on the Web, we propose techniques to automatically detect private images, and to enable privacy-oriented image search. To this end, we learn privacy classifiers trained on a large set of manually assessed Flickr photos, combining textual metadata of images with a variety of visual features. We employ the resulting classification models for specifically searching for private photos, and for diversifying query results to provide users with a better coverage of private and public content. Large-scale classification experiments reveal insights into the predictive performance of different visual and textual features, and a user evaluation of query result rankings demonstrates the viability of our approach.
Causes of tracheal re-intubation after craniotomy: A prospective study

Background: Re-intubation of neurosurgical patients after a successful tracheal extubation in the operating room is not uncommon. However, no prospective study has ever addressed this concern. This study was aimed at analyzing various risk factors of re-intubation and its effect on patient outcome. Methods: Patients aged between 18-60 yrs and of ASA physical status I and II undergoing elective craniotomies over a period of two yrs were included. A standard anesthetic technique using propofol, fentanyl, rocuronium, and isoflurane/sevoflurane was followed, in all these patients. ‘Re-intubation’ was defined as the necessity of tracheal intubation within 72 hrs of a planned extubation. Data were collected and analyzed employing standard statistical methods. Results: One thousand eight hundred and fifty patients underwent elective craniotomy, of which 920 were included in this study. A total of 45 (4.9%) patients required re-intubation. Mean anesthesia duration and time of re-intubation were 6.3±1.8 and 24.6±21.9 hrs, respectively. The causes of re-intubation were neurological deterioration (55.6%), respiratory distress (22.2%), unmanageable respiratory secretion (13.3%), and seizures (8.9%). The most common post-operative radiological (CT scan) finding was residual tumor and edema (68.9%). Seventy-three percent of the re-intubated patients had satisfactory post-operative cough-reflex. The ICU and hospital stay, and Glasgow outcome scale at discharge were not significantly affected by different causes of re-intubation. Conclusion: Neurological deterioration is the most common cause of re-intubation following elective craniotomies owing to residual tumor and surrounding edema. A satisfactory cough reflex may not prevent subsequent re-intubation in post-craniotomy patients.
Optimized WiMAX Profile Configuration for Smart Grid Communications

Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) is one of the wireless communication technologies adopted for communication in smart grids. Due to the inherent differences between smart grid and mobile broadband applications, it is important to adjust planning and deployment of wireless technologies, including WiMAX. To this end, WiMAX is being amended to feature a smart grid system profile known as WiGrid. In this paper, we investigate the optimized configuration of this WiGrid profile, i.e., the choice of frame duration, type-of-service to traffic mapping, scheduling strategies, as well as the system architecture, such that smart grid communication requirements are met. The simulation-based evaluation of WiGrid networks with optimized configurations is facilitated through a newly developed WiGrid module for the network simulator-3 environment. Our results indicate that a priority-based scheduler is an appropriate solution for scheduling time-critical smart grid applications. Furthermore, schedulers should be implemented in such a way that grant sizes smaller than the packet size are avoided, and adjusting the uplink/downlink bandwidth ratio to favor uplink traffic is important to achieve the required latency defined for smart grid applications.
Predicting and controlling infectious disease epidemics using temporal networks

Infectious diseases can be considered to spread over social networks of people or animals. Mainly owing to the development of data recording and analysis techniques, an increasing amount of social contact data with time stamps has been collected in the last decade. Such temporal data capture the dynamics of social networks on a timescale relevant to epidemic spreading and can potentially lead to better ways to analyze, forecast, and prevent epidemics. However, they also call for extended analysis tools for network epidemiology, which has, to date, mostly viewed networks as static entities. We review recent results of network epidemiology for such temporal network data and discuss future developments.
An Efficient Dual Approach to Distance Metric Learning

Distance metric learning is of fundamental interest in machine learning because the distance metric employed can significantly affect the performance of many learning methods. Quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning is a popular approach to the problem, but typically requires solving a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally expensive. Standard interior-point SDP solvers typically have a complexity of $O(D^{6.5})$ (with $D$ the dimension of input data), and can thus only practically solve problems exhibiting less than a few thousand variables. Since the number of variables is $D (D+1) / 2 $, this implies a limit upon the size of problem that can practically be solved of around a few hundred dimensions. The complexity of the popular quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning approach thus limits the size of problem to which metric learning can be applied. Here we propose a significantly more efficient approach to the metric learning problem based on the Lagrange dual formulation of the problem. The proposed formulation is much simpler to implement, and therefore allows much larger Mahalanobis metric learning problems to be solved. The time complexity of the proposed method is $O (D ^ 3) $, which is significantly lower than that of the SDP approach. Experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art, but is applicable to significantly larger problems. We also show that the proposed method can be applied to solve more general Frobenius-norm regularized SDP problems approximately.
Pregnancy is a drag: hydrodynamics, kinematics and performance in pre- and post-parturition bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

SUMMARY Constraints on locomotion could be an important component of the cost of reproduction as carrying an increased load associated with eggs or developing fetuses may contribute to decreased locomotor performance for females across taxa and environments. Diminished performance could increase susceptibility to predation, yet the mechanism(s) by which gravidity and pregnancy affect locomotion remains largely unexplored. Here we demonstrate that morphology, hydrodynamics and kinematics were altered during pregnancy, providing a mechanism for diminished locomotor performance in two near-term pregnant (10 days pre-parturition) bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Near-term pregnancy resulted in a 51±14% increase in frontal surface area, coinciding with dramatic increases in drag forces while gliding. For example, pregnant females encountered 80 N of drag at 1.7 m s–1 whereas that magnitude of drag was not encountered until speed doubled for females 18 months post-parturition. Indeed, drag coefficients based on frontal surface area were significantly greater during pregnancy (Cd,F=0.22±0.04) than at 18 months post-parturition (Cd,F=0.09±0.01). Pregnancy also induced a gait change as stroke amplitude and distance per stroke were reduced by 13 and 14%, respectively, compared with non-pregnant periods (1–24 months post-parturition). This was concomitant with a 62 and 44% reduction in mean and maximum swim speeds, respectively, during the pregnancy period. Interestingly, attack speeds of known predators of dolphins surpass maximum speeds for the pregnant dolphins in this study. Thus, pregnant dolphins may be more susceptible to predation. This study demonstrates unequivocally that changes in morphology, hydrodynamics and kinematics are associated with diminished performance during pregnancy in dolphins.
THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVITY RELATED FATIGUE ON STATIC AND DYNAMIC POSTURAL CONTROL IN COLLEGE ATHLETES

HOSSEINIMEHR, S. H; DANESHMANDI, H; NORASTEH, A. A. The effects of activity related fatigue on static and dynamic postural control in college athletes. Brazilian Journal of Biomotricity, v. 4, n. 2, p. 148155, 2010. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of activity related fatigue on static and dynamic postural control in college athletes. Thirty college athletes (15 males, 15 females, age = 22.32 ± 0.92 years, height = 169.5 ± 5.7cm, and weight = 64.2 ±3.4 kg) participated in this study voluntary. Leg stance time and Star Excursion Balance Test were used for evaluation of static and dynamic postural control, respectively. Subjects performed a functional fatigued protocol that lasted 15 minutes. Using the Borg scale, also measured rating of perceived exertion before, middle and after the fatigue protocol. Repeated measure (1×3) ANOVA and post-hoc (LSD) was used for comparison of difference in fatigue reported scores. Paired sample test was used for comparison of difference between pre and post test in static and dynamic postural control. The findings indicated that dynamic postural control decreased after fatigue (P<0.05), in contrast there is no significant difference between pre and post test in static postural control (P< 0.05). Although it is not realistic to expect a coach to stop practice or decrease practice times because someone is experiencing fatigue which may lead to injury, this topic needs attention. To be realistic, most coaches could rearrange how practices are conducted.
Exploring the Paths Between Ethical Leadership and Task Performance: Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence

Ethical leadership is known to produce multiple positive employee outcomes. Ethical leaders provide guidance to their followers on ethical standards. The ability of emotional perception enables one to perceive and understand his/her own feelings completely and correctly, and better react to situations involving emotional interactions. Emotional intelligence has also positive impacts on various employee outcomes such as task performance. Task performance is linked to main organizational activities and behaviors typically specified in job definitions. Task performance is influenced by several factors, one of which is ethical leadership. Accordingly, the present study aimed to examine how emotional intelligence is related with task performance and whether ethical leadership has a mediating role in such relationship. The study was conducted with 256 participants using a set of questionnaires. The study data was analyzed using structural equation modeling. The study results showed that emotional intelligence has a positive effect on task performance, and ethical leadership plays a fully mediating role in such relationship.
Rapid detection of CYP1A1, CYP2D6, and NAT variants by multiplex polymerase chain reaction and allele-specific oligonucleotide assay.

Drugs and carcinogens are excreted from the body after metabolic conversion involving enzymes mediating oxidative metabolism and conjugation. Many of the corresponding genes exhibit functional polymorphisms that contribute to individual cancer susceptibility. To increase the efficiency and to facilitate genotyping, we developed a combined approach (PCR-ASO) which includes multiplex PCR and allele-specific oligonucleotide (ASO) hybridization. PCR primer pairs were used to amplify the following alleles/variants: CYP1A1*1, *2A, *2B; CYP2D6*3, *4; NAT1*4, *3, *10, *11, *14, *15; and NAT2*4, *5A, *5B, *5C, *6A, *7B. The products were dot-blotted and polymorphisms were detected by hybridization with ASO probes for both wild-type and variant sites in parallel. This approach was validated by genotyping DNA samples from a French-Canadian population that was previously analyzed by PCR-RFLP. The variants frequencies were compared with the data on other populations available in the literature. The PCR-ASO assay appears to be simple, efficient, and cost-effective, particularly if a large number of samples are to be screened for several DNA variants. This approach has potential for automation with microplates and robotic workstations for high throughput.
Fusion of the envelope of mucous droplets with the luminal plasma membrane in acinar cells of the cat submandibular gland

The release of mucus from acinar cells of the cat submandibular gland was examined by electron microscopy. The limiting membrane of mucous droplets fuses with the luminal plasma membrane to form a five-layered contact. This is converted to a three-layered membrane (unit membrane) by avulsion of the plasmalemma. Attenuation and rupture of this membranous barrier permits the contents of the mucous droplets to flow into the lumen.
Efficient computation of subqueries in complex OLAP

Expressing complex OLAP queries involving nested expressions using normal group-by, aggregation, and joins can be extremely difficult. We propose a technique that translates nested query expressions into an algebra extended with a complex OLAP operator. The GMDJ is an operator with a simple and easy to optimize implementation that is particularly useful for OLAP computations because the size of intermediate results is bound by the size of the base-value argument relation. We show that all SQL subqueries can be expressed in the algebra using GMDJs. This not only makes it easy to integrate subqueries into any query engine that supports GMDJs, but also gives access to a broad range of OLAP optimization strategies for evaluating subqueries. We discuss the coalescing of GMDJs and the completion of tuples, two GMDJ optimizations that are particularly relevant to subquery processing. Our experimental results demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our approach for computing subquery expressions.