Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comprehensive Research Synopsis and Systematic Meta-Analyses in Parkinson's Disease Genetics: The PDGene Database

More than 800 published genetic association studies have implicated dozens of potential risk loci in Parkinson's disease (PD). To facilitate the interpretation of these findings, we have created a dedicated online resource, PDGene, that comprehensively collects and meta-analyzes all published studies in the field. A systematic literature screen of ∼27,000 articles yielded 828 eligible articles from which relevant data were extracted. In addition, individual-level data from three publicly available genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were obtained and subjected to genotype imputation and analysis. Overall, we performed meta-analyses on more than seven million polymorphisms originating either from GWAS datasets and/or from smaller scale PD association studies. Meta-analyses on 147 SNPs were supplemented by unpublished GWAS data from up to 16,452 PD cases and 48,810 controls. Eleven loci showed genome-wide significant (P<5×10−8) association with disease risk: BST1, CCDC62/HIP1R, DGKQ/GAK, GBA, LRRK2, MAPT, MCCC1/LAMP3, PARK16, SNCA, STK39, and SYT11/RAB25. In addition, we identified novel evidence for genome-wide significant association with a polymorphism in ITGA8 (rs7077361, OR 0.88, P = 1.3×10−8). All meta-analysis results are freely available on a dedicated online database (www.pdgene.org), which is cross-linked with a customized track on the UCSC Genome Browser. Our study provides an exhaustive and up-to-date summary of the status of PD genetics research that can be readily scaled to include the results of future large-scale genetics projects, including next-generation sequencing studies.
Exploring dynamically reconfigurable multicore designs with NoRC designer

This paper presents a toolset named NoRC (Network on a Reconfigurable Chip) designer and IP infrastructure designed to investigate the effects of partial dynamic reconfiguration in multicore designs mapped to commercial FPGAs. Dynamic reconfiguration means in this context that tiles and communication routers can be modified at run-time adapting to changes in application requirements, operating conditions and/or process variations. The NoRC system is oriented at avoiding any centralized control with functions mapped to tiles at runtime depending on processing capabilities and location. The dynamic nature of the platform means that following a request for an application from an external host any idle tile can be configured as a master able to make additional requests to nearby tiles or as a slave able to service the requests. NoRC designer is used in this paper to investigate possible task mapping strategies suitable for this type of adaptive platform and also the power and partial reconfiguration overheads of commercial FPGAs.
Assessing Intercultural Competence: A Review.

Educators and employers increasingly acknowledge the value of intercultural competence. While most higher education institutions consider these skills as important outcomes for their graduates, few have specifically addressed the means by which to measure the wide variety of results. Having and using intercultural assessment tools will allow educators to understand and measure the effec­ tiveness and outcomes of their initiatives and will also aid them in developing appropriate interven­ tions and responses at a variety of levels.
Received Signal Strength Technique Performance in Sensor Network Localization Application

In this paper, we initially present RSSI vs Distance test results performed indoor and outdoor with Texas Instruments CC2431 Development Kit. In addition, Location Engine of Development Kit performance is presented with 3 and 4 reference nodes. An alternative algorithm based on Cayley-Menger Determinant, proposed by M.Cao, B.D. O. Anderson and A.S. Morse has been implemented in Matlab and it is compared with Location Engine. It is concluded that accuracy of alternative one slightly better than Location Engine with 3 reference nodes. Increasing reference node count makes Location Engine more accurate.
Mid-Infrared Emission of Transition Metal Co2+-Doped ZnSe Nanocrystals at Room Temperature via Hydrothermal Preparation

A series of Co2+:ZnSe and Co2+:ZnSe/ZnSe nanocrystals emitting mid-infrared (mid-IR) fluorescence centered at around 3.4 and 4.7 μm were successfully synthesized via a simple hydrothermal method. The core/shell structure and post-heat treatment under reducing atmosphere were adopted to decrease the nanocrystal’s surface quenching centers and defects and improve the mid-IR photoluminescence. By analysis of the X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution TEM, Fourier transform IR, absorption, and mid-IR emission measurements of serial concentrations of Co2+-doped ZnSe nanocrystals, the crystal phase, grain size, core/shell structure, distribution of Co2+ ions, impurities on the surface, and mid-IR emission performance were investigated in detail. By use of optimum Co2+ concentration, core/shell structure construction, and proper post-heat treatment, the mid-IR emission intensities of nanocrystals were enha.
Compact Image Representation by Edge Primitives

Abstract Bandpassed images, commonly used for edge detection, also retain information about intensities between the edge boundaries. Using the familiar Laplacian-of-Gaussian as a bandpass filter, we present a method to extract and code the edge-associated information (edge primitives) and recover an image representation with high structural fidelity. We demonstrate that the edge-primitives representation is compact and therefore can be coded with high compression ratios.
The Art of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: The Past, the Present and the Future

In 2006, Yamanaka and Takahashi electrified the scientific community by discovering that mouse somatic cells can be converted into embryonic stem cell-like cells by retroviral transduction of four transcription factors: Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc (OSKM). The first generation of mouse induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells was incompletely reprogrammed, and failed to contribute to germline transmission. Nearly one year later, three groups, including Yamanaka's, improved the reprogramming methodology and generated iPS cells that were in many respects, indistinguishable from ES cells, and also contributed to chimera formation and germline transmission. Shortly thereafter, the successful reprogramming of human somatic cells opened the gate for the development of patient-specific iPS cells for biomedical research and clinical application. Though human iPS cells resemble human ES cells in many aspects, the current iPS cell technologies showed several limitations for clinical usage. First, the efficiency of iPS cell generation is still low and the reprogramming process takes at least two weeks. Second, the virus-delivery of reprogramming factors introduces inconceivable risks of insertional mutagenesis in the genome. Third, given the various strategies for direct reprogramming, it remains difficult to assess the quality of iPS cells generated in each lab and for each patient. These issues should be addressed properly before any iPS cells could be translated into clinic. Here, we review recent progress in human iPS cell technologies, with a focus on the virus-free and integration-free iPS cell generation, which may lead towards the eventual goal of clinical applications. Keyword: Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), reprogramming strategy, hiPSC efficiency.
Indexing Structure For Handling Uncertain Spatial Data

Consideration of uncertainty in manipulation and management of spatial data is important. Unlike traditional fuzzy approaches, in this paper we use a probability-based method to model and index uncertain data in the application of Mojave desert endangered species protection. The query is a feature vector describing the habitat for certain species, and we are interested in finding geographic locations suitable for that species. We select appropriate layers of the geo-spatial data affecting species life, called habitat features, and model the uncertainty for each feature as a probability density function (PDF). We partition the geographic area into grids, assign an uncertain feature vector to each cell, and develop a filter-and-refine indexing method. The filter part is a bottom-up binary tree based on the automated clustering result obtained using the EM algorithm. The refine part processes the filtered results based on the “similarity” between the query and properties of each cell. We compare the performance of our proposed indexing structure with the intersection method from Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program (MDEP); our method is more selective and efficient.
Enhancing IBM Requisite Pro with IR-based Traceability Recovery Features

The potential benefits of traceability are well known, as well as the impracticability of maintaining traceability links manually. Recently, Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been proposed in order to support the software engineer during the traceability link identification process. Clearly, a research method/tool has more change to be transferred to practitioner if its usefulness is investigated through empirical user studies and it can be integrated within a commercial and widely used CASE tool. In this paper we try to achieve this result showing how IBM Requisite Pro can be enriched with IR-based traceability recovery features.
Burn Serum Increases Staphylococcus aureus Biofilm Formation via Oxidative Stress

Staphylococcus aureus is a common pathogen isolated from burn patients that can form biofilms on burn wounds and implanted deep vein catheters, which often leads to refractory infections or even biofilm-related sepsis. As biofilm formation is usually regulated by environmental conditions, we hypothesized that serum composition may be altered after burn injury, potentially affecting the ability of infecting bacteria to form biofilms. As predicted, we observed that serum from burn-injured rats increases biofilm formation by S. aureus and also induces bacterial aggregation and adherence to human fibronectin and fibrinogen. Analysis of potential regulatory factors revealed that exposure to burn serum decreases expression of the quorum-sensing agr system and increases mRNA levels of some biofilm inducers such as sarA and icaA. In addition, we also observed that burn serum imposes oxidative stress and increases expression of key oxidoreductase genes (sodA, sodM, katA, and ahpC) in S. aureus. Importantly, the ability of burn serum to enhance biofilm formation and bacterial cell aggregation can be abrogated by treatment with an antioxidant. Taken together, these findings indicate that burn serum increases S. aureus biofilm formation via elevated oxidative stress, and may lead to novel strategies to control biofilm formation and infection in burn patients.
Communities of Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Zhidao: Complementing or competing?

Community Question Answering (CQA) attracts increasing volume of research on question retrieval, high quality content discovery and experts finding. However, few studies are focused on community per se of CQA services and also provide an in-depth analysis of them. This paper aims to enrich our knowledge on two of these CQA services, namely Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Zhidao through reviewing their communities, comparing similarities and differences of the two communities, together with analyzing their influence on solving questions. Six data sets are employed for comparative analysis. In this paper: (1) We analyze the social network structures of Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Zhidao; (2) We compare the the social community characteristics of top contributors; (3) We reveal the behaviors of users in different categories in these two portals; (4) We reveal temporal trends of these characteristics; (5) We find that the community of Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Zhidao complement each other in efficiency and effectiveness of answering questions.
Rescue of skeletal muscle α-actin–null mice by cardiac (fetal) α-actin

Skeletal muscle α-actin (ACTA1) is the major actin in postnatal skeletal muscle. Mutations of ACTA1 cause mostly fatal congenital myopathies. Cardiac α-actin (ACTC) is the major striated actin in adult heart and fetal skeletal muscle. It is unknown why ACTC and ACTA1 expression switch during development. We investigated whether ACTC can replace ACTA1 in postnatal skeletal muscle. Two ACTC transgenic mouse lines were crossed with Acta1 knockout mice (which all die by 9 d after birth). Offspring resulting from the cross with the high expressing line survive to old age, and their skeletal muscles show no gross pathological features. The mice are not impaired on grip strength, rotarod, or locomotor activity. These findings indicate that ACTC is sufficiently similar to ACTA1 to produce adequate function in postnatal skeletal muscle. This raises the prospect that ACTC reactivation might provide a therapy for ACTA1 diseases. In addition, the mouse model will allow analysis of the precise functional differences between ACTA1 and ACTC.
MQSearch: image search by multi-class query

Image search is becoming prevalent in web search as the number of digital photos grows exponentially on the internet. For a successful image search system, removing outliers in the top ranked results is a challenging task. Typical content based image search engines take an input image from one class as a query and compute relevance between the query and images in a database. The results often contain a large number of outliers, since these outliers may be similar to the query image in some way. In this paper we present a novel search scheme using query images from multiple classes. Instead of conducting query search for one image class at a time, we conduct multi-class query search jointly. By using several query classes that are similar to each other for multi-class query, we can utilize information across similar classes to fine tune the similarity measure to remove outliers. This strategy can be used for any information search application. In this work, we use content based image search to illustrate the concept.
IEM: A New Image Enhancement Metric for Contrast and Sharpness Measurements

Evaluation of images, after processing, is an important step for determining how well the images are being processed. Quality of image is usually assessed using image quality metrics. Unfortunately, most of the commonly used metrics cannot adequately describe the visual quality of the enhanced image. There is no universal measure, which specifies both the objective and subjective validity of the enhancement for all types of images. This paper is a study of the various quantitative metrics for enhancement against changes in contrast and sharpness of both general and medical images. A new metric is proposed that is useful for measuring the improvement in contrast as well as sharpness. It is computationally simple and can be used for all types of images.
Nerve Regeneration through a Healthy Nerve Trunk: A New and Hopeful Conduit for Bridging Nerve Defects

Background: Considering a healthy nerve trunk as the hypothetically ideal conduit, a new experimental model using an intact nerve for bridging a nerve defect was contemplated. Methods: Thirty rats were used. In group I (double coaptation), a segment was removed from the peroneal nerve. Both the proximal and distal stumps were repaired end-to-side to the tibial nerve. In group II (only distal coaptation), only the distal nerve stump was repaired. In group III (control), the transected segment was immediately repaired primarily in its original orientation as a nerve graft. A walking track analysis was conducted periodically for 28 months. The horseradish peroxidase retrograde labeling technique was used for tracking the origin of the axons presented in the distal stump of the peroneal nerve in group I, and morphologic studies were also carried out for all the groups. Results: Functional assessment revealed that the difference between group I and group II was significant. The horseradish peroxidase labeling test suggested that the nerve fibers in the distal stump of the peroneal nerve were mostly from its original proximal stump passed by the way of the tibial nerve bridge. Conclusion: This study suggested that the axons of the proximal stump of a sectioned nerve can sprout into another intact nerve trunk by the way of an end-to-side repair site, regenerate, and advance in its epineurium distally for a distance and pass into its original distal stump if it was repaired end-to-side. It was thought that the technique could be used in clinical cases with short nerve defects as an alternative method to grafts and conduits.
Biologic synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid.

The knowledge drawn in recent years from studies of bacterial transformation and viral infection of bacterial cells combined with other evidences, has just about convinced most of us that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic substance. We shall assume then that it is DNA which not only directs the synthesis of the proteins and the development of the cell but that it must also be the substance which is copied so as to provide for a similar development of the progeny of that cell for many generations. DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done. Also like a tape recording, exact copies can be made from it so that this information can be used again and elsewhere in time and space. Are these two functions, the expression of the code (protein synthesis) and the copying of the code (preservation of the race) closely integrated or are they separable? What we have learned from our studies over the past five years and what I shall present is that the replication of DNA can be examined and at least partially understood at the enzymatic level even though the secret of how DNA directs protein synthesis is still locked in the cell.
An integrated Prolog programming environment

For a long time it has been argued that the right kind of representation can provide insight and understanding for a problem. Believing in the general hypothesis that the limitations of our thoughts are all too often identical with the limits of our imagination and visualization capabilities, we have developed a Prolog visualization concept based on a module interconnection graph. This approach provides support for the construction of Prolog systems out of modules (programming-in-the-large). In the approach described below we present an integrated Prolog programming environment based on special features of our hypertext system KnowS. Beyond these features are typed links, node classes, and transfer modules allowing dataflow between several components. But a program is not only a static object. To study the details of a program, we really have to see it in operation. Therefore we also provide animation of program execution. We are convinced that our integrated approach of managing sources of different kinds of information, supporting their structuring and the facility to maintain a Prolog program by hypertext nodes and links is an important step to the integration of software engineering environments and hypertext systems.
Approximate Nearest Neighbor: Towards Removing the Curse of Dimensionality

We present two algorithms for the approximate nearest neighbor problem in high dimensional spaces. For data sets of size n living in IR d , the algorithms require space that is only polynomial in n and d , while achieving query times that are sub-linear in n and polynomial in d . We also show applications to other high-dimensional geometric problems, such as the approximate minimum spanning tree.
Think before You Shoot: The Relationship between Cognition and Marksmanship

Abstract : In recent years, psychologists have begun to explore the relationship between cognition and sport performance, specifically the role of mental imagery in performance. One relatively unexplored learned skill, however, is marksmanship. The objectives of this exploratory study were 1) to document the relationship between cognitive processes and marksmanship performance and 2) to test the statistical validity of a friend/foe detection task as a measure of decision making (DM). Ninety US Army active duty Soldiers and Reservists completed a cognitive test battery including measures of DM, the standard marksmanship qualifying task, and a friend/foe detection task. A correlational analysis revealed significant relationships between marksmanship performance and measures of attention, spatial orientation, and visual scanning. However, the results do not support the validity of this friend/foe detection task a measure of DM. These results support the assertion that return-to-duty Soldiers experiencing cognitive impairments may require additional marksmanship training and re-learning prior to reintegration.
Resolving “You” in Multi-Party Dialog

This paper presents experiments into the resolution of “you” in multi-party dialog, dividing this process into two tasks: distinguishing between generic and referential uses; and then, for referential uses, identifying the referred-to addressee(s). On the first task we achieve an accuracy of 75% on multi-party data. We achieve an accuracy of 47% on determining the actual identity of the referent. All results are achieved without the use of visual information.
Self-determination moderates the effects of perceived competence on intrinsic motivation in an exercise setting.

According to Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory, perceptions of self-determination moderate the effects of perceived competence on intrinsic motivation, with perceived competence only positively influencing intrinsic motivation under conditions of some self-determination. Vallerand’s (1997) hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation suggests that self-determination and competence have only independent effects on intrinsic motivation. The aim of this study was to test these competing models. Women aerobics participants (n = 146) completed measures of self-determination, perceived competence, and intrinsic motivation for exercise. Moderated hierarchical regression revealed a significant interactive effect of self-determination and perceived competence. A plot of the regression of intrinsic motivation on perceived competence under conditions of high and low self-determination, however, showed that the interaction did not take the expected form. Variations in perceived competence p.
Richter's Syndrome in the Brain First Manifested as an Ischaemic Stroke

Isolated central nervous system involvement in Richter's syndrome (RS) is extremely rare and only 6 such cases have been described, so far. We report a 60-year-old woman with B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) heavily pretreated with cladribine based regimens and rituximab in whom RS in the brain was first manifested as a stroke. Initial cranial computed tomography (CT) revealed a hypodense area in the right parietal lobe showing no contrast enhancement. The follow-up CT done after 2 months showed an irregular, slightly hyperdense tumor surrounded by oedema with mass effect and midline shift. However, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) examinations revealed no pathological changes. Neurosurgical operation was performed and the diagnosis of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) has been established on the basis of histological and immunological investigation of the tumor. The pattern of immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) gene rearrangement in the patients' bone marrow aspirate and brain tumor was identical and suggested that both tumors originated from the same B-cell progenitors. The patient was then treated with brain irradiation (2000 cGy) and complete remission as assessed by MRI was achieved. Significant neurological improvement was observed and no clinical progression was stated 3 months after radiotherapy.