Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nanotechnology researchers’ collaboration relationships: A gender analysis of access to scientific information

Women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, particularly at higher levels of organizations. This article investigates the impact of this underrepresentation on the processes of interpersonal collaboration in nanotechnology. Analyses are conducted to assess: (1) the comparative tie strength of women’s and men’s collaborations, (2) whether women and men gain equal access to scientific information through collaborators, (3) which tie characteristics are associated with access to information for women and men, and (4) whether women and men acquire equivalent amounts of information by strengthening ties. Our results show that the overall tie strength is less for women’s collaborations and that women acquire less strategic information through collaborators. Women and men rely on different tie characteristics in accessing information, but are equally effective in acquiring additional information resources by strengthening ties. This article demonstrates that the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics has an impact on the interpersonal processes of scientific collaboration, to the disadvantage of women scientists.
Sample-efficient Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning with Supervised Data for Dialogue Management

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have significant potential for dialogue policy optimisation. However, they suffer from a poor performance in the early stages of learning. This is especially problematic for on-line learning with real users. Two approaches are introduced to tackle this problem. Firstly, to speed up the learning process, two sample-efficient neural networks algorithms: trust region actor-critic with experience replay (TRACER) and episodic natural actor-critic with experience replay (eNACER) are presented. For TRACER, the trust region helps to control the learning step size and avoid catastrophic model changes. For eNACER, the natural gradient identifies the steepest ascent direction in policy space to speed up the convergence. Both models employ off-policy learning with experience replay to improve sample-efficiency. Secondly, to mitigate the cold start issue, a corpus of demonstration data is utilised to pre-train the models prior to on-line reinforcement learning. Combining these two approaches, we demonstrate a practical approach to learn deep RL-based dialogue policies and demonstrate their effectiveness in a task-oriented information seeking domain.
Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein C Modulates Translation of c-myc mRNA in a Cell Cycle Phase-Dependent Manner

ABSTRACT The c-myc proto-oncogene plays a key role in the proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, and regulation of the cell cycle. Recently, it was demonstrated that the 5′ nontranslated region (5′ NTR) of human c-myc mRNA contains an internal ribosomal entry site (IRES). In this study, we investigated cellular proteins interacting with the IRES element of c-myc mRNA. Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein C (hnRNP C) was identified as a cellular protein that interacts specifically with a heptameric U sequence in the c-myc IRES located between two alternative translation initiation codons CUG and AUG. Moreover, the addition of hnRNP C1 in an in vitro translation system enhanced translation of c-myc mRNA. Interestingly, hnRNP C was partially relocalized from the nucleus, where most of the hnRNP C resides at interphase, to the cytoplasm at the G2/M phase of the cell cycle. Coincidently, translation mediated through the c-myc IRES was increased at the G2/M phase when cap-dependent translation was partially inhibited. On the other hand, a mutant c-myc mRNA lacking the hnRNP C-binding site, showed a decreased level of translation at the G2/M phase compared to that of the wild-type message. Taken together, these findings suggest that hnRNP C, via IRES binding, modulates translation of c-myc mRNA in a cell cycle phase-dependent manner.
Nuclear Import of the Retinoid X Receptor, the Vitamin D Receptor, and Their Mutual Heterodimer*

The nuclear receptor retinoid X receptor (RXR) can regulate transcription through homotetramers, homodimers, and heterodimers with other nuclear receptors such as the vitamin D receptor (VDR). The mechanisms that underlie the nuclear import of RXR, VDR, and RXR-VDR heterodimers were investigated. We show that RXR and VDR translocate into the nucleus by distinct pathways. RXR strongly bound to importinβ and was predominantly nuclear in the absence of ligand. Importin binding and nuclear localization of RXR were modestly enhanced by its ligand, 9-cis-retinoic acid. On the other hand, VDR selectively associated with importinα. Importin association and correspondingly nuclear import of VDR were markedly augmented by 1,25(OH)2D3. RXR-VDR dimerization inhibited the ability of RXR to bind importinβ and to mobilize into the nucleus using its own nuclear localization signal. In contrast, VDR recruited RXR-VDR heterodimers to importinα and mediated nuclear import of the heterodimers in response to 1,25(OH)2D3. Hence nuclear import of RXR-VDR heterodimers is mediated preferentially by VDR and is controlled by the VDR ligand. The observations reveal a novel mechanism by which an RXR heterodimerization partner dominates the activity of the heterodimers.
End Effects Mitigation for Empirical Mode Decomposition with nonlinear Gray Model

To mitigate end effects of empirical mode decomposition (EMD), a novel approach inspired by the nonlinear gray model (GM) termed as GM(1,1,α) is presented. Other than traditional linear or mirror extension on the boundary, the GM(1,1,α) model is applied to predict two extrema at both ends of the data. It is worth noting that our GM(1,1,α) model is particularly useful for predicting uncertainty data. According to numerical experiments on synthetic signal as well as real data series, the proposed method gives very comparable results with other three generally acknowledged methods, including the linear extension (LE), window function (WF), and mirror symmetry (MS) based methods. That is, the proposed method can reduce end effects and improve decomposition results of EMD significantly.
Carbon‐11 radiolabeling of an oligopeptide containing tryptophan hydrochloride via a Pictet‐Spengler reaction using carbon‐11 formaldehyde

A procedure for the synthesis of a11C‐labeled oligopeptide containing [1‐11C]1,2,3,4‐tetrahydro‐β‐carboline‐3‐carboxylic acid ([1‐11C]Tpi) from the corresponding Trp•HCl‐containing peptides has been developed involving a Pictet‐Spengler reaction with [11C]formaldehyde. The synthesis of [1‐11C]Tpi from Trp and [11C]formaldehyde was examined as a model reaction with the aim of developing a facile and effective method for the labeling of peptides with carbon‐11. The Pictet‐Spengler reaction of Trp and [11C]formaldehyde in acidic media (TsOH or HCl) afforded the desired [1‐11C]Tpi in a moderate radiochemical yield. Herein, the application of a Pictet‐Spengler reaction to an aqueous solution of Trp•HCl gave the desired product with a radiochemical yield of 45.2%. The RGD peptide cyclo[Arg‐Gly‐Asp‐D‐Tyr‐Lys] was then selected as a substrate for the labeling reaction with [11C]formaldehyde. The radiolabeling of a Trp•HCl‐containing RGD peptide using the Pictet‐Spengler reaction was successful. Furthermore, the remote‐controlled synthesis of a [1‐11C]Tpi‐containing RGD peptide was attempted by using an automatic production system to generate [11C]CH3I. The radiochemical yield of the [1‐11C]Tpi‐containing RGD at the end of synthesis (EOS) was 5.9 ± 1.9% (n = 4), for a total synthesis time of about 35 min. The specific activity was 85.7 ± 9.4 GBq/µmol at the EOS. Copyright © 2013 European Peptide Society and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Clinical Performance of Two Fluorescence-Based Methods in Detecting Occlusal Caries Lesions in Primary Teeth

This in vivo study aimed to evaluate the performance of 2 fluorescence-based methods in detecting occlusal caries lesions in primary teeth, compared with the performance of visual inspection and radiographic methods, and to propose a mathematic correction of the diagnostic parameters due to the imperfect reference standard method used in the study. Two examiners assessed the occlusal surfaces of 407 primary teeth (62 children) using visual inspection (ICDAS), radiographic, DIAGNOdent pen (pen type laser fluorescence; LFpen), and fluorescence camera (FC) methods. At the noncavitated threshold (NC) the reference standard method was the results of ICDAS, and at the dentine caries threshold (D3) teeth diagnosed with dentine caries by ICDAS or radiographic methods were subjected to operative treatment to confirm the presence of lesion. Reproducibility, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and the area under the ROC curve were calculated for the methods at both thresholds. At the NC threshold, LFpen had a slightly better performance compared to the FC and radiographic methods. However, at the D3 threshold, both fluorescence-based methods performed similarly. Visual inspection and radiographic methods presented higher specificities but lower sensitivities than fluorescence methods. After corrections, there was a significant decrease in some parameters. In conclusion, both fluorescence-based methods presented similar performance in detecting occlusal dentine caries lesions in primary teeth, but they usually gave more false-positive results than did the visual and radiographic methods. The correction proposed shows that the performance of the methods can be overestimated, and the correction should be validated and considered in further studies that use an imprecise reference standard method.
Competition between rhythmic and linguistic organization in a sentence-rhythm Stroop task

We provide a test of Patel's [(2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 674–681] shared syntactic integration resources hypothesis by investigating the competition between determinants of rhythmic parsing and linguistic parsing using a sentence-rhythm Stroop task. We played five-note rhythm patterns in which each note is replaced with a spoken word of a five-word sentence and asked participants to indicate the starting point of the rhythm while they disregarded which word would normally be heard as the first word of the sentence. In Study 1, listeners completed the task in their native language. In Study 2, we investigated whether this competition is weakened if the sentences were in a listener's non-native language. In Study 3, we investigated how much language mastery is necessary to obtain the effects seen in Studies 1 and 2. We demonstrate that processing resources for rhythmic parsing and linguistic parsing overlap with one another, particularly when the task is demanding. We also show that the tendency for language to bias processing does not require deep knowledge of the language.
Correlation between Sequential Variables: A Reply to Schroeder et al.

1. Chaire de Recherche du Canada en Conservation des Ecosystemes Nordiques et Centre d’Etudes Nordiques, Universite du Quebec a Rimouski, 300 allee des Ursulines, Rimouski, Quebec G5L 3A1, Canada; 2. Centre d’Etudes Nordiques et Departement de Biologie, Universite Laval, Quebec, Quebec G1K 7P4, Canada; 3. Departement des Sciences Biologiques, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, 141 President-Kennedy, B.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-ville, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3P8, Canada
MDS Cognitive Performance Scale.

BACKGROUND Chronic cognitive impairment is a major problem in U.S. nursing homes, yet traditional assessment systems in most facilities included only limited information on cognitive status. Following the Congressional mandate in the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA '87), U.S. nursing homes now complete the Minimum Data Set (MDS), a standardized, comprehensive assessment of each resident's functional, medical, psychosocial, and cognitive status. We designed a Cognitive Performance Scale (CPS) that uses MDS data to assign residents into easily understood cognitive performance categories. METHODS Information was drawn from three data sets, including two multistate data sets constructed for the Health Care Financing Administration. The prevalence and reliability of the MDS cognitive performance variables were established when assessed by trained nursing personnel. Five selected MDS items were combined to create the single, functionally meaningful seven-category hierarchical Cognitive Performance Scale. RESULTS The CPS scale corresponded closely with scores generated by the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Test for Severe Impairment, nursing judgments of disorientation, and neurological diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. CONCLUSIONS The new CPS provides a functional view of cognitive performance, using readily available MDS data. It should prove useful to clinicians and investigators using the MDS to determine a resident's cognitive assets.
Identification and validation of a potential lung cancer serum biomarker detected by matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization‐time of flight spectra analysis

Many abnormalities detected in the thorax by routine conventional imaging studies are benign, yet all require further evaluation because of the concern for cancer. To address this deficiency and develop a serum biomarker for lung cancer, we designed a matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization‐time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI‐TOF MS) based platform to display the proteins present in the serum of patients with or without lung cancer, and then challenged the scientific community to analyze these data with the aim of determining specific ion signal differences among the resulting spectra. The most statistically significant ion peak identified by the various analysis algorithms that differentiated the serum of patients with lung cancer from the serum of individuals without lung cancer was found at m/z 11 702. We identified the protein responsible for this ion peak as serum amyloid A (SAA; Mr = 11 682.7) by partial purification followed by in‐gel digestion and peptide mapping. By enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay, we showed SAA to be present at 286 ng/mL in the serum of cancer patients vs. 34.1 ng/mL in the serum of individuals without cancer. These data suggest that the combination of MALDI‐TOF MS and computer analysis can be a powerful tool in the search for serum biomarkers of lung cancer and other diseases.
Factors in Long-Term Marriages

There are few empirical studies of the factors involved in long-term marriages. The present study involves a nonrandom sample of 351 couples who have been married 15 years or more. Differences were found in the reported reasons for staying together between happy, unhappy, and mixed (one partner happy and one unhappy) marriages. For happy couples, the most frequently mentioned reason for staying together was the perceived nature of the relationship, then the belief in marriage as a long-term commitment. Among the mixed and unhappy marriages, the most frequently named reason was the belief that marriage is a long-term commitment. Nineteen percent of those in mixed marriages and 47% in unhappy marriages said the children kept the marriage together. Various other factors are also reported, along with the meaning of the responses.
Stimulation of Hybrid Poplar Growth in Petroleum-Contaminated Soils through Oxygen Addition and Soil Nutrient Amendments

Hybrid poplar trees (Populus deltoides×nigra DN34) were grown in a greenhouse using hydrocarbon-contaminated soil from a phytoremediation demonstration site in Heath, Ohio. Two independent experiments investigated the effect of nutrient addition on poplar growth and the importance of oxygen addition to root development and plant growth. Biomass measurements, poplar height, and leaf color were used as indicators of plant health in the selection of a 10/5/5 NPK fertilizer applied at 1121 kg/ha (112 kg-N, 24.4 kg-P, 46.5 kg-K per ha) to enhance hybrid poplar growth at the Heath site. Five passive methods of oxygen delivery were examined, including aeration tubes, gravel addition, and an Oxygen Release Compound® (ORC). When ORC was placed in coffee filters above hydrocarbon-contaminated soil, a statistically significant increase of 145% was observed in poplar biomass growth, relative to unamended controls. The ORC in filters also stimulated significant increases in root density. A 15.2-cm interval of soil directly below ORC addition exhibited an increase from 2.6±1.0 mg/cm3 to 4.8±1.0 mg/cm3, showing stimulation of root growth in hydrocarbon-stained soil. The positive response of hybrid poplars to oxygen amendments suggests that overcoming oxygen limitation to plants should be considered in phytoremediation projects when soil contamination exerts a high biochemical oxygen demand, such as in former refinery sites.
APPLICATION OF CHI-SQUARE TEST OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE UTILIZATION OF POSTAL AND TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES

The introductory part of this paper concerns a marketing survey of the utilization of postal and telecommunication services in a regional entrepreneurial environment. The methodology of the chi-square test of independence between two qualitative statistic figure values is detailed in the next part of the paper. This methodology is applied to the results of the marketing survey in three groups; internal test of independence, cross test of independence and test of independence in the regional context. On the each identified pairs of qualitative statistic figure values (A and B) the chi-square test of independence was applied. The null hypothesis regarding their independence was defined. Then the assumptions concerning rejecting or not rejecting the null hypothesis were defined. In the case of rejecting the null hypothesis the degree of association was determined by one of the measures of association.
RFS: An LSM-Tree-Based File System for Enhanced Microdata Performance

File system workloads are increasing write-heavy. The growing capacity of RAM in modern nodes allows many reads to be satisfied from memory while writes must be persisted to disk. Today’s sophisticated local file systems like Ext4, XFS and Btrfs optimize for reads but suffer from workloads dominated by microdata (including metadata and tiny files). In this paper we present an LSM-tree-based file system, RFS, which aims to take advantages of the write optimization of LSM-tree to provide enhanced microdata performance, while offering matching performance for large files. RFS incrementally partitions the namespace into several metadata columns on a per-directory basis, preserving disk locality for directories and reducing the write amplification of LSM-trees. A writeordered log-structured layout is used to store small files efficiently, rather than embedding the contents of small files into inodes. We also propose an optimization of global bloom filters for efficient point lookups. Experiments show our library version of RFS can handle microwrite-intensive workloads 2-10 times faster than existing solutions such as Ext4, Btrfs and XFS. key words: local file systems, log-structured merge tree, microdata, namespace partitioning, write-ordered write-optimized store
A Stochastic Multi-Objective Framework for Optimal Scheduling of Energy Storage Systems in Microgrids

This paper presents a stochastic framework for day-ahead scheduling of microgrid energy storage systems in the context of multi-objective (MO) optimization. Operation cost of microgrid in normal conditions and load curtailment index in case of unscheduled islanding events (initiated by disturbances in the main grid) are chosen as main criteria of the proposed scheme. In practice, duration of disconnection from the upstream network is unknown in unscheduled islanding incidents and cannot be predicted with certainty. To properly handle the uncertainties associated with time and duration of such events as well as microgrid load and renewable power generation, stochastic models are involved in the MO scheduling framework and they are formulated as mixed integer linear programming problems. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is employed to effectively cope with the MO optimization problem and a fuzzy decision making approach is employed for appropriate representation of microgrid operator's preferences in compromising between the two objectives. The proposed scheme is implemented on a test microgrid and the obtained results demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of this framework in dealing with conflicting requirements of microgrid security and economic operation.
Realistic PHY Modeling for Accurate Wireless Simulations

The importance of simulation has diminished in wireless networking despite the advantages of simulation in developing and evaluating new protocols, such as repeatability and scalability. This is due to constant questioning of the validity of the wireless simulation results by the wireless networking community. As an alternative, testbed evaluations, have become popular since they provide more confident results. However, adopting this approach is typically more time consuming and challenging. This thesis takes a step forward in improving the confidence of simulating IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. To this end, we introduce a site-specific IEEE 802.11 Physical (PHY) layer model for wireless networks, which is representative of an actual testbed. It uses testbed measurements as input to the model. As the main advantage of this model, we gain the ability to run realistic and repeatable experiments. The main contributions of this thesis are empirical propagation, frame error, frame detection and interference models. These contributions are based on a thorough analysis of which wireless parameters impact the accuracy of the simulation results. Then, we evaluate their impact both at PHY and transport layers, in different environments (indoor vs. outdoor) and set-ups (e.g., single flow, multiple concurrent flows, multi-hop scenarios). Our results show that environmental conditions and device specifications have a major impact on the wireless communication. Moreover, the site-specific approach for modeling wireless networks significantly improves the simulation results in comparison to the typical simulation models. Thesis: “Realistic PHY Modeling for Accurate Wireless Simulations”
Genetic mapping of a major site of phosphorylation in adenovirus type 2 E1A proteins

Adenovirus early region 1A (E1A) encodes two acidic phosphoproteins which are required for transactivation of viral transcription, efficient viral DNA replication in phase G0-arrested human cells, and oncogenic transformation of rodent cells. Biochemical analysis of in vivo 32P-labeled adenovirus type 2 E1A proteins purified with monoclonal antibodies demonstrated that these proteins were phosphorylated at multiple serine residues. Two-dimensional phosphotryptic peptide maps of wild-type and mutant E1A proteins were used to locate a major site of E1A protein phosphorylation at serine-219 of the large E1A protein. Although this serine fell within a consensus sequence for phosphorylation by the cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinases, experiments with mutant CHO cells defective in these enzymes indicated that it was not. Oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis was used to substitute an alanine for serine-219. This mutation prevented phosphorylation at this site. Nonetheless, the mutant was indistinguishable from the wild type for early gene transactivation, replication on G0-arrested WI-38 cells, and transformation of cloned rat embryo fibroblast cells.
UVB‐induced GM‐CSF production is suppressed by dexamethasone in HaCaT Cells

Background: Epidermal keratinocytes are important sources of a wide variety of cytokines that include the Granulocyte‐macrophage Colony Stimulating Factor (GM‐CSF). Glucocorticoids have been shown to inhibit the production of several cytokines. However, their effect on GM‐CSF synthesis by keratinocytes is still unknown.