Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self‐renewing canine oligodendroglial progenitor expanded as oligospheres

We have previously shown that oligodendroglial progenitors (OP) can be generated from multipotent rat neural precursor cells. We now report the generation of a homogeneous culture of canine OP from neural precursor cells. In non‐adherent cultures, homogeneous OP cultures were obtained in 6–8 weeks of treatment with B104 cell conditioned medium (B104CM). In adherent cultures where astrocytes grew as a layer of substrate, colonies of OP invariably appeared at 10–14 days in vitro (DIV) and the colonies were expanded as free‐floating spheres (oligospheres), in the presence of B104CM, suggesting that astrocytes facilitate the generation of canine OP. The oligosphere cells were characterized by self‐renewal in the presence of B104CM and by terminal differentiation into oligodendrocytes after withdrawal of B104CM. Transplantation studies indicated that the extensively expanded oligosphere cells retained myelination capacity. The oligospheres thus provide a valuable source for experimental cell therapy studies. J. Neurosci. Res. 54:181–190, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Predictors of Response to Treadmill Exercise in Stroke Survivors

Background. Aerobic treadmill exercise (T-EX) therapy has been shown to benefit walking and cardiorespiratory fitness in stroke survivors with chronic gait impairment even long after their stroke. The response, however, varies between individuals. Objective . The purpose of this post hoc analysis of 2 randomized controlled T-EX trials was to identify predictors for therapy response. Methods. In all, 52 participants received T-EX for 3 (Germany) or 6 (United States) months. Improvements in overground walking velocity (10 m/6-min walk) and fitness (peak VO2) were indicators of therapy response. Lesion location and volume were measured on T1-weighted magnetic resonance scans. Results . T-EX significantly improved gait and fitness, with gains in 10-m walk tests ranging between +113% and −25% and peak VO2 between −12% and 88%. Baseline walking impairments or fitness deficits were not predictive of therapy response; 10-m walk velocity improved more in those with subcortical rather than cortical lesions and in patients with smaller lesions. Improvements in 6-minute walk velocity were greater in those with more recent strokes and left-sided lesions. No variable other than training intensity, which was different between trials, predicted fitness gains. Conclusions. Despite proving overall effectiveness, the response to T-EX varies markedly between individuals. Whereas intensity of aerobic training seems to be an important predictor of gains in cardiovascular fitness, lesion size and location as well as interval between stroke onset and therapy delivery likely affect therapy response. These findings may be used to guide the timing of training and identify subgroups of patients for whom training modalities could be optimized.
Tissue Localization of Toll‐Like Receptors in Biopsy Specimens of Liver from Children Infected with Hepatitis C Virus

Toll‐like receptors (TLR) are important tools of innate immunity, localized mainly on cells of the immune system, but also have been shown on cells of other origin. In the current study, they have been searched in biopsy specimens of liver from children bearing chronic viral hepatitis of C type (HCV). TLR2, TLR3 and TLR4 were traced by means of polyclonal antibodies and avidin‐biotin complex (ABC) immunohistochemistry. Besides, mRNA for TLR was looked for using specific primers and polymerase chain reaction. Several controls, including neutralization of primary antibody with respective blocking peptide, confirmed the specificity of the immunohistochemical reaction. All TLR tested could be visualized in a focal distribution in single hepatocytes and some cells of inflammatory infiltrates. There was no reaction whatsoever in liver samples not infected with hepatotropic virus. In molecular studies, mRNA for TLR2 and TLR4 was detected in both noninfected and hepatitis B virus‐infected established cell lines of human hepatoma as well as in HCV+ biopsy samples. These data indicate that TLR can be traced in liver cells, both at the protein and at the mRNA level. Their irregular and focal distribution in HCV+, but not in HCV–, liver suggests some role of TLR in the pathogenesis of chronic viral hepatitis, at least in children.
Antarctic sea ice control on ocean circulation in present and glacial climates

Significance The ocean’s role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide on glacial–interglacial timescales remains an unresolved issue in paleoclimatology. Many apparently independent changes in ocean physics, chemistry, and biology need to be invoked to explain the full signal. Recent understanding of the deep ocean circulation and stratification is used to demonstrate that the major changes invoked in ocean physics are dynamically linked. In particular, the expansion of permanent sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere results in a volume increase of Antarctic-origin abyssal waters and a reduction in mixing between abyssal waters of Arctic and Antarctic origin. In the modern climate, the ocean below 2 km is mainly filled by waters sinking into the abyss around Antarctica and in the North Atlantic. Paleoproxies indicate that waters of North Atlantic origin were instead absent below 2 km at the Last Glacial Maximum, resulting in an expansion of the volume occupied by Antarctic origin waters. In this study we show that this rearrangement of deep water masses is dynamically linked to the expansion of summer sea ice around Antarctica. A simple theory further suggests that these deep waters only came to the surface under sea ice, which insulated them from atmospheric forcing, and were weakly mixed with overlying waters, thus being able to store carbon for long times. This unappreciated link between the expansion of sea ice and the appearance of a voluminous and insulated water mass may help quantify the ocean’s role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide on glacial–interglacial timescales. Previous studies pointed to many independent changes in ocean physics to account for the observed swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Here it is shown that many of these changes are dynamically linked and therefore must co-occur.
Collaborative Filtering Based on P2P Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are used by millions of people for sharing music files. As these networks become ever more popular, they also serve as an excellent source for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. This paper reviews the latest MIR studies based on P2P data-sets, and presents a new file sharing data collection system over the Gnutella. We discuss several advantages of P2P based data-sets over some of the more “traditional” data sources, and evaluate the information quality of our data-set in comparison to other data sources (Last.fm, social tags, biography data, and MFCCs). The evaluation is based on an artists similarity task using Partial Order Embedding (POE). We show that a P2P based Collaborative Filtering dataset performs at least as well as “traditional” data-sets, yet maintains some inherent advantages such as scale, availability and additional information features such as ID3 tags and geographical location.
Information broadcasting algorithm for Finite-Time Reaching-at-Risk Consensus with application to weapon-target assignment

We propose a randomized algorithm aimed at reaching, in finite time, exact consensus among a set of agents that are linked though a connected, possibly time-varying, graph. The information exchanged among neighboring agents is limited in size, by randomly selecting the content from an agent internal state. The time needed to reach the agreement is a random variable, whose empirical cumulative distribution function is utilized to determine a stopping rule that ensures consensus is achieved with a prescribed confidence level. Simulation results show that the consensus-reaching time obtained with a prescribed confidence level compares relatively well to local-averaging-based algorithms. The algorithm is shown to be robust, to some extent, to lossy communications and is demonstrated on a weapon-target assignment problem.
Incorporating Flexibility into the Normalized Cut Image Segmentation Algorithm

Image segmentation is the process of dividing a digital image into individual segments which share similar visual characteristics. The Normalized Cut (NCut) algorithm is one of the commonly used graph-based approaches in image segmentation. The NCut algorithm aims to extract big picture segments or global features of an image, a process which closely resembles how a human would approach image segmentation [1]. However, the algorithm is heavily dependent on a constant tuning parameter that is subject to arbitrary assignment prior to running the algorithm. This tuning parameter is independent of the image and indirectly specifies the level of details in the image one requires from the segmentation. Given this shortcoming, we propose a more flexible approach that introduces a local tuning parameter for each pixel over a small neighborhood in the image. We believe that the tuning parameter should represent the local variation of the features in the image in order to correctly tune the necessary components in the segmentation process. In particular, we look at improving the segmentations by introducing multiple “localvariation” tuning parameters that are adjusted to specific regions of the image. We do this through a semi-supervised method, where the regions are defined using the segmentations of the original NCut algorithm. Through our methodology, we incorporate additional local variation into tuning the algorithm without sacrificing the global features extracted by the original NCut algorithm. Results show that our methodology manages to improve the original NCut segmentations for some sample images.
TRAPID : Rapid Analysis of Transcriptome Data

Detailed information about the platform and the tools are provided in the different sections. In addition, we provide a detailed step-by-step Tutorial http://bioinformatics.psb. ugent.be/webtools/trapid/documentation/tutorial) to guide non-experts through the different steps of processing a complete transcriptome using TRAPID. Sample data including Panicum transcrips (from Meyer et al., 2012; see [1]) and subset labels can be found at ftp://ftp.psb. ugent.be/pub/trapid/.
Effects of Growth Medium, Inoculum Size, and Incubation Time on Culturability and Isolation of Soil Bacteria

ABSTRACT Soils are inhabited by many bacteria from phylogenetic groups that are poorly studied because representatives are rarely isolated in cultivation studies. Part of the reason for the failure to cultivate these bacteria is the low frequency with which bacterial cells in soil form visible colonies when inoculated onto standard microbiological media, resulting in low viable counts. We investigated the effects of three factors on viable counts, assessed as numbers of CFU on solid media, and on the phylogenetic groups to which the isolated colony-forming bacteria belong. These factors were inoculum size, growth medium, and incubation time. Decreasing the inoculum size resulted in significant increases in the viable count but did not appear to affect colony formation by members of rarely isolated groups. Some media that are traditionally used for soil microbiological studies returned low viable counts and did not result in the isolation of members of rarely isolated groups. Newly developed media, in contrast, resulted in high viable counts and in the isolation of many members of rarely isolated groups, regardless of the inoculum size. Increased incubation times of up to 3 months allowed the development of visible colonies of members of rarely isolated groups in conjunction with the use of appropriate media. Once isolated, pure cultures of members of rarely isolated groups took longer to form visible colonies than did members of commonly isolated groups. Using these new media and extended incubation times, we were able to isolate many members of the phyla Acidobacteria (subdivisions 1, 2, 3, and 4), Gemmatimonadetes, Chloroflexi, and Planctomycetes (including representatives of the previously uncultured WPS-1 lineage) as well as members of the subclasses Rubrobacteridae and Acidimicrobidae of the phylum Actinobacteria.
Recognition of phonemes and words in singing

This paper studies the influence of n-gram language models in the recognition of sung phonemes and words. We train uni-, bi-, and trigram language models for phonemes and bi- and trigrams for words. The word-level language model is estimated from a textual lyrics database. In the recognition we use a hidden Markov model based phonetic recognizer adapted to singing voice. The models were tested on monophonic singing and on vocal lines separated from polyphonic music. On clean singing the phoneme recognition accuracies varied from 20% (no language model) to 39% (bigram) and on polyphonic music from 6% (no language model) to 20% (bigram). In word recognition, one fifth of the words were recognized in clean singing, the performance being lower on polyphonic music. We study the use of the recognition results in a query-by-singing application. Using the recognized words, we retrieve the songs by searching for the text in a text lyrics database. For the word recognition system having only 24% correct recognition rate, the first retrieved song is correct in 57% of the test cases.
Characterization of a Copper Resistance Plasmid Conserved in Copper-Resistant Strains of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato

A 35-kilobase plasmid was conserved among 12 copper-resistant strains of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato. Restriction patterns of this plasmid from each strain were identical, and a cloned copper resistance gene from 1 strain hybridized to the same location on the 35-kilobase plasmid of all 12 strains.
A Hamilton-Jacobi Equation for the Continuum Limit of Nondominated Sorting

We show that nondominated sorting of a sequence $X_1,\dots,X_n$ of independent and identically distributed random variables in $\mathbb{R}^d$ has a continuum limit that corresponds to solving a Hamilton--Jacobi equation involving the probability density function $f$ of $X_i$. Nondominated sorting is a fundamental problem in multiobjective optimization and is equivalent to finding the canonical antichain partition and to problems involving the longest chain among Euclidean points. As an application of this result, we show that nondominated sorting is asymptotically stable under bounded random perturbations in $X_1,\dots,X_n$. We give a numerical scheme for computing the viscosity solution of this Hamilton--Jacobi equation and present some numerical simulations for various density functions.
Cost-effective power system design reducing standby power consumption for the consumer electronic devices

Commercial home appliances using remotely controlled system consume the electric power while in standby mode to prepare for receiving a turn-on remote signal. The proposed power system can significantly reduce the standby power consumption without increasing the cost. Furthermore, since a Electronic Double Layer Capacitor (EDLC) is used as an auxiliary power storage element, the life cycle is longer and system reliability can be stronger than prior approaches. When the energy of the EDLC is not sufficient for turning on the appliance, the power system is charging the EDLC without affecting the main system. The proposed power system is verified with the commercial LCD TV and the 3.93mW standby consumption is obtained. This standby consumption can be regarded as zero standby equipment by the IEC-62031 standard.
A Comparative Analysis of Speaker Identification on English and Hindi Database

this paper a text-dependent speaker recognition method is presented by combining Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) and Euclidean distance. The robustness of this speaker identification method for different speaking language is analyzed in this paper. The speaker identification algorithm using English and Hindi Indian voice database (IVD) which contains sentences of data spoken is accomplished. An improvement in recognition rate is observed by using different windows and increasing the number of training voice samples. Accuracy upto 100% can be obtained for text-dependent speaker identification for different windows by using a short training and testing utterance about 4 seconds. KeywordsIdentification, MFCC, Euclidean distance classifier, Feature extraction and database.
Power Allocation for Coordinated Multi-Cell Systems With Imperfect Channel and Battery-Capacity-Limited Receivers

This letter studies the transmit power allocation in downlink coordinated multi-cell systems with the battery-capacity-limited receivers, where the battery level of receivers is considered. The power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference noise ratio of users under the per-base station power constraints and the feasible maximum received data rate constraints determined by the receiver battery level. The optimal solutions are derived by the proposed monotonic optimization technique-based algorithm. The proposed algorithm can extend the battery lifetime of the receivers with lower battery level. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Physical Layout Segmentation of Mail Application Dedicated to Automatic Postal Sorting System

Every day, the postal sorting systems diffuse several tons of mails. It is noted that the principal origin of mail rejection is related to the failure of address-block localization task, particularly, of the physical layout segmentation stage. The bottom-up and top-down segmentation methods bring different knowledge that should not be ignored when we need to increase the robustness. Hybrid methods combine the two strategies in order to take advantages of one strategy to the detriment of other. Starting from these remarks, our proposal makes use of a hybrid segmentation strategy more adapted to the postal mails. The high level stages are based on the hierarchical graphs coloring, allowing managing through a pyramidal data organization, the complex rules leading the interpretation of the connected components decomposition of interest zones. Today, no other work in this context has make use of the powerfulness of this tool. The performance evaluation of our approach was tested on a corpus of 10000 envelope images. The processing times and the rejection rate were considerably reduced.
Structure and properties of waterborne polyurethane adhesives obtained by different methods

The structure and properties of two aqueous polyurethane dispersions prepared by two different methods (acetone method and prepolymer mixing method) were compared. The aqueous polyurethane dispersion obtained by the acetone method (PU-AP) showed a narrower particle size distribution than that of the sample obtained by the prepolymer mixing method (PU-PMP), because the use of an organic solvent in the synthesis produced a lower prepolymer viscosity, thus facilitating dispersion in water. PU-PMP showed more crosslinked structure than PU-AP, and, consequently, PU-PMP had higher elastic (G') and viscous (G") moduli and also a higher cross-over temperature between these moduli in the rheological curves. On the other hand, the lower degree of crosslinking in PU-AP facilitated polyurethane crystallinity. Thermal degradation resistance was similar and both polyurethanes showed similar decomposition patterns. Immediate adhesion of the aqueous poly-urethane dispersions to PVC was low, although it was somewhat higher for the joint produced with PU-AP. The adhesive strength increased by increasing the time after joint formation, and after 72 h was similar for the two adhesives.
Color Based Image Retrieval of Uncalibrated Images

Changes in imaging conditions and a number of pre-processing stages can result in similar originals that exhibit a low measure of similarity when color information is used in standard image retrieval methods. We examine here the performance of various color-based retrieval strategies when coupled with Retinex-based pre-processing to see whether, and to what degree, the effectiveness of retrieval is improved, regardless of the strategy adopted. The results of experiments performed on two databases, one of 310 paintings and the other of 387 ceramic objects, are reviewed.
Assessment of Barriers to Improve Diabetes Management in Older Adults

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether assessment of barriers to self-care and strategies to cope with these barriers in older adults with diabetes is superior to usual care with attention control. The American Diabetes Association guidelines recommend the assessment of age-specific barriers. However, the effect of such strategy on outcomes is unknown. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We randomized 100 subjects aged ≥69 years with poorly controlled diabetes (A1C >8%) in two groups. A geriatric diabetes team assessed barriers and developed strategies to help patients cope with barriers for an intervention group. The control group received equal amounts of attention time. The active intervention was performed for the first 6 months, followed by a “no-contact” period. Outcome measures included A1C, Tinetti test, 6-min walk test (6MWT), self-care frequency, and diabetes-related distress. RESULTS We assessed 100 patients (age 75 ± 5 years, duration 21 ± 13 years, 68% type 2 diabetes, 89% on insulin) over 12 months. After the active period, A1C decreased by −0.45% in the intervention group vs. −0.31% in the control group. At 12 months, A1C decreased further in the intervention group by −0.21% vs. 0% in control group (linear mixed-model, P < 0.03). The intervention group showed additional benefits in scores on measures of self-care (Self-Care Inventory-R), gait and balance (Tinetti), and endurance (6MWT) compared with the control group. Diabetes-related distress improved in both groups. CONCLUSIONS Only attention between clinic visits lowers diabetes-related distress in older adults. However, communication with an educator cognizant of patients’ barriers improves glycemic control and self-care frequency, maintains functionality, and lowers distress in this population.
Problems due to open faults in the interconnections of self-checking data paths

In this work, the problem of open faults affecting the interconnections of SC circuits composed by data-path and control is analyzed. In particular it is shown that, in case opens affect control signals, some problems may arise even if both control and data-path signals are concurrently checked. In particular, wrong codewords may be generated at the outputs of multiplexers and registers. To address this problem, new registers and multiplexers are proposed which allow the design data-paths which are TSC with respect to opens (and resistive opens). These components are also TSC with respect to stuck-at, transistor and gross delay faults. They present a good testability with respect to resistive bridgings.