Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ATPase-deficient mitochondrial inner membrane protein ATAD3A disturbs mitochondrial dynamics in dominant hereditary spastic paraplegia

Abstract De novo mutations in ATAD3A (ATPase family AAA-domain containing protein 3A) were recently found to cause a neurological syndrome with developmental delay, hypotonia, spasticity, optic atrophy, axonal neuropathy, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Using whole-exome sequencing, we identified a dominantly inherited heterozygous variant c.1064G > A (p.G355D) in ATAD3A in a mother presenting with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and axonal neuropathy and her son with dyskinetic cerebral palsy, both with disease onset in childhood. HSP is a clinically and genetically heterogeneous disorder of the upper motor neurons. Symptoms beginning in early childhood may resemble spastic cerebral palsy. The function of ATAD3A, a mitochondrial inner membrane AAA ATPase, is yet undefined. AAA ATPases form hexameric rings, which are catalytically dependent on the co-operation of the subunits. The dominant-negative patient mutation affects the Walker A motif, which is responsible for ATP binding in the AAA module of ATAD3A, and we show that the recombinant mutant ATAD3A protein has a markedly reduced ATPase activity. We further show that overexpression of the mutant ATAD3A fragments the mitochondrial network and induces lysosome mass. Similarly, we observed altered dynamics of the mitochondrial network and increased lysosomes in patient fibroblasts and neurons derived through differentiation of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells. These alterations were verified in patient fibroblasts to associate with upregulated basal autophagy through mTOR inactivation, resembling starvation. Mutations in ATAD3A can thus be dominantly inherited and underlie variable neurological phenotypes, including HSP, with intrafamiliar variability. This finding extends the group of mitochondrial inner membrane AAA proteins associated with spasticity.
Energy management of networked, solar cells powered, wireless sensors

Solar cells combined with power management algorithms enable the dynamic scheduling of Wireless Sensor Networks applications in a reference period, where the objective of the scheduling is to maximize the application quality level while conserving an energy level sufficient to constantly maintain the sensor operation. In this paper we consider networked, solar cells powered wireless sensors and we propose an algorithm aims to find a global, (sub)optimal scheduling that maximizes the overall quality of service in the sensors and keeps the system energy neutral, thus ensuring that the system works uninterruptedly.
The Psychology of the Chinese people

The Chinese people constitute more than a quarter of the world's population. Until now there has been no single volume that summarizes the data available - both in English and Chinese - on the psychological functioning of Chinese people. This book aims to fill that gap, emphasizing the prime areas of research, both past and present, the theoretical models used to integrate the findings and areas for future research. It also provides a cross-cultural comparative perspective on the data. The topics covered include socialization, perception, cognition, personality, psychopathology, social behaviour and organization.
Intrafamilial Spread of the Same Clarithromycin-Resistant Helicobacter pylori Infection Confirmed by Molecular Analysis

ABSTRACT Clarithromycin-resistant Helicobacter pylori (CRHP) is increasing worldwide, especially in children. We report a family case in which both the mother and child were infected with CRHP. DNA analysis revealed that all of the mother's and daughter's isolates were indistinguishable, suggesting that the same CRHP strain spread between the family members. The spread of CRHP within families may be increasing.
Application of Feature Extraction Technique : A Review

Extraction of features can be viewed as a preprocessing step which eliminates distracting inconsistency from a dataset, so that downstream classifiers or regression estimators perform better and hence various applications can be implemented from it. The area where feature extraction ends and classification, or regression, begins is necessarily gloomy: an ultimate feature extractor would simply map the data to its class labels, for the categorization task. These features can be used for image matching or recognition techniques or learning in supervised algorithms. Here in this paper all methods that are implemented for the extraction of features is converse about and a relative investigation is exposed in the paper so that by analyzing the various limitations of the algorithms in the future a more modified and effective feature extraction based technique is implemented.
So What Happens after the Event? Exploring the Realisation of Professional Development with Early Childhood Educators

THIS PAPER CONSIDERS WHETHER simply providing and attending professional development and training opportunities enhances quality in early childhood education, or whether the educators' actual practices are a better indication. It reports on research that examined factors impacting on early childhood educators' realisation of professional development once participants returned to their organisation. Using case studies, the paper points to a range of factors educators identified as either enabling or hindering endeavours to practise and sustain new understandings within their early childhood service. It concludes by recommending a number of strategies that lead to a more effective realisation of professional development opportunities, including the importance of continued dialogue with all stakeholders about understandings of effective professional development in the field of early childhood education.
ALIFE 14 : Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems

In this paper, we propose an approach inspired by Gärdenfors conceptual spaces, to represent concepts (specifically colour) in a situated embodied agent. Through this we also extend the work of Braitenberg by proposing an alternate vehicle capable of recognising colour concepts. Furthermore, we demonstrate how it can learn to distinguish between different colours by evolving our vehicle’s conceptual space using Template Based Evolution. Background and motivation Categorisation and the ability to recognise and represent concepts has been described as a fundamental cognitive ability and a primary research goal of AI (Gärdenfors and Williams, 2001). The traditional approach from classical AI is to represent concepts symbolically using a top-down design process. The bottom-up subsymbolic (connectionist) approach, in contrast, emphasizes the importance of symbol grounding and the crucial role that the body has to play, by having the agent situated in the world and embodied— able to perceive and interact with the world through sensorymotor co-ordination (Pfeifer and Scheier, 2001). Being able to recognise similarity is key to many biological phenomena, such as how simplistic agents are able to learn what food is safe to eat. Whilst prototypical items are easily represented through the symbolic approach, this does not take into account possible variations that naturally occur in real-life. Take the problem of colour recognition, for example. In natural systems, it is very unlikely to find exactly the same colour—no leaf on a tree is ever the same shade of green, or a berry is ever the same shade of red. Gärdenfors (2004) presents an alternative methodology, called Conceptual Spaces which models knowledge in the form of regions in a geometric space made up of quality dimensions. By modeling in this way, Gärdenfors argues that an agent is able to recognise variations on a defined concept prototype. A primary motivation for this paper is to see if a Conceptual Spaces representation can be implemented in a situated, embodied agent in a manner analogous to the approach adopted by Pfeifer and Scheier (2001) in order to demonstrate how concepts such as colour can be learnt in an unsupervised way.
loratory Average

We introduce a model-based average reward Reinforcement Learning method called H-learning and compare it with its discounted counterpart, Adaptive Real-Time Dynamic Programming, in a simulated robot scheduling task. We also introduce an extension to H-learning, which automatically explores the unexplored parts of the state space, while always choosing greedy actions with respect to the current value function. We show that this “Auto-exploratory H-learning” performs better than the original H-learning under previously studied exploration methods such as random, recency-based, or counter-based ex-
Estrategias de afrontamiento del estrés en el ámbito deportivo: fundamentos téoricos e instrumentos de evaluación

RESUMEN. Los atletas deben desarrollar un amplio rango de estrategias de afrontamiento para enfrentarse a las situaciones estresantes caracteristicas del entorno competitivo. La perspectiva transaccional de Lazarus y Folkman distingue entre dos grandes dimensiones funcionales del afrontamiento: afrontamiento orientado a la tarea y afrontamiento orientado a la emocion. A partir de este marco teorico y de observaciones empiricas se ha propuesto un modelo de estrategias de afrontamiento en el deporte basado en el control de las emociones, la organizacion de la recepcion de informacion, la planificacion de las respuestas y la ejecucion de las acciones apropiadas. Los deportistas que utilizan estrategias de afrontamiento incorrectas o que son incapaces de interpretar de forma adecuada los eventos relacionados con la actividad deportiva y de reaccionar de manera racional, experimentan un estres cronico y prolongado que se traduce en un empeoramiento de la capacidad de ejecucion e incluso en la aparicion de burnout y abandono deportivo. Resulta evidente que los atletas que participan en deportes competitivos necesitan emplear habilidades psicologicas y estrategias de afrontamiento efectivas para lograr satisfacer sus expectativas y mejorar su rendimiento. Aunque en los ultimos anos se han desarrollado diversos cuestionarios para la identificacion de las estrategias de afrontamiento utilizadas por los deportistas, aun es necesario confirmar cuales son los instrumentos idoneos para determinar bajo que situaciones las estrategias de afrontamiento cognitivas y conductuales alcanzan su mayor eficacia.
Atmospheric and Forest Decoupling of Passive Microwave Brightness Temperature Observations Over Snow-Covered Terrain in North America

This study addresses two significant sources of uncertainty prevalent in snow water equivalent (SWE) retrievals derived from advanced microwave scanning radiometer (AMSR-E) passive microwave (PMW) brightness temperature (Tb) observations at 18.7 and 36.5 GHz. Namely, atmospheric and overlying forest effects are decoupled from the original AMSR-E PMW Tb observations using relatively simple, physically based radiative transfer models. Comparisons against independent Tb measurements collected during airborne PMW Tb surveys highlight the effectiveness of the proposed AMSR-E atmospheric decoupling procedure. The atmospheric contribution to Tb ranges from 1 to 3 K depending on the frequency and polarization measured as well as meteorologic conditions at the time of AMSR-E overpass. It is further shown that forest decoupling should be conducted as a function of both land cover type and snow cover class. The exponential decay relationship between the forest structure parameter, namely, MODIS-derived leaf area index (LAI) and forest transmissivity, is fitted across snow-covered terrain in North America. The fitted exponential function can be utilized during forest decoupling activities for evergreen needle-leaved forest and woody savanna regions, but remains uncertain in other forest types due to a sparsity of snow-covered areas. By removing forest-related Tb contributions from the original AMSR-E observations, the results suggest that Tb spectral difference between 18.7 and 36.5 GHz, in general, increases across thinly vegetated to heavily vegetated regions, which can be beneficial when applied to traditional SWE retrieval algorithms.
De Novo Transcriptome Analysis of Oncomelania hupensis after Molluscicide Treatment by Next-Generation Sequencing: Implications for Biology and Future Snail Interventions

The freshwater snail Oncomelania hupensis is the only intermediate host of Schistosoma japonicum, which causes schistosomiasis. This disease is endemic in the Far East, especially in mainland China. Because niclosamide is the only molluscicide recommended by the World Health Organization, 50% wettable powder of niclosamide ethanolamine salt (WPN), the only chemical molluscicide available in China, has been widely used as the main snail control method for over two decades. Recently, a novel molluscicide derived from niclosamide, the salt of quinoid-2',5-dichloro-4'-nitro-salicylanilide (Liu Dai Shui Yang An, LDS), has been developed and proven to have the same molluscicidal effect as WPN, with lower cost and significantly lower toxicity to fish than WPN. The mechanism by which these molluscicides cause snail death is not known. Here, we report the next-generation transcriptome sequencing of O. hupensis; 145,008,667 clean reads were generated and assembled into 254,286 unigenes. Using GO and KEGG databases, 14,860 unigenes were assigned GO annotations and 4,686 unigenes were mapped to 250 KEGG pathways. Many sequences involved in key processes associated with biological regulation and innate immunity have been identified. After the snails were exposed to LDS and WPN, 254 unigenes showed significant differential expression. These genes were shown to be involved in cell structure defects and the inhibition of neurohumoral transmission and energy metabolism, which may cause snail death. Gene expression patterns differed after exposure to LDS and WPN, and these differences must be elucidated by the identification and annotation of these unknown unigenes. We believe that this first large-scale transcriptome dataset for O. hupensis will provide an opportunity for the in-depth analysis of this biomedically important freshwater snail at the molecular level and accelerate studies of the O. hupensis genome. The data elucidating the molluscicidal mechanism will be of great benefit in future snail control efforts.
Reducing Calibration Effort for WLAN Location System using Segment Technique with Autocorrelation

Context-aware applications become more and more popular in today's life. Location-aware information has derived a lot of research issues. This paper presents a precise indoor RF-based WLAN (IEEE 802.11) locating system named precise indoor locating system (PILS). Most proposed location systems acquire well location estimation results but consume high level of manual effort to collect a huge amount of signal data. As a consequence, the system becomes impractical and manpower-wasted. In this paper, we aim to reduce the manual effort in constructing radio map and maintain high accuracy in our system. We propose models for data calibration, interpolating, and location estimation in PILS. In data calibration and location estimation models, we consider of autocorrelation of signal samples to enhance the accuracy. Wireless channel propagation model is also in our concern. Large scale and small scale fading are involved in the wireless channel propagation.
Electromagnetic wave absorbing properties of magnetic particles and carbon nanomaterials reinforced composites

A RAM (Radar Absorbing Materials) composite was prepared based on hybrid fillers containing magnetic loss material with excellent oxidation resistance and high magnetization and dielectric loss material CNF with controllable permittivity and high dispersibility. As the loading of CNF as a dielectric loss filler is increased, the permittivity is increased and the permeability of Co-CNF composites is almost same value for the fixed loading of Co as a magnetic loss filler. Highly dispersed Co and CNF as the hybridized loss materials by the dispersion processes of the homogenizer and three-roll mill enhance the efficiency of the electromagnetic wave absorbing properties. Highly dispersed magnetic particles and CNF as the hybridized loss materials enhance the efficiency of the electromagnetic wave absorbing properties at a thin thickness of 2 mm or less.
The study of detecting barrel eccentric hole based on machine vision technology

Positioning technology based on machine vision technology is proposed for poisonous liquid automatic filling machine barrels. Barrel image is collected by CCD sensor and processed with the image edge detection technology to separate the barrels image from background. Hough transform method is used to get the position of the hole of barrel in the pixel coordinate, after coordinate transform, the actual position is obtained in space coordinates. Finally, Stepping motor is droved by stepping drive system to located the actual position of the hole of barrel and achieve the automatic positioning.
Racial Classification in Assisted Reproduction

This essay seeks to clarify the moral stakes of reproductive practices that facilitate offspring selection according to race. Egg vendors and sperm banks partition donor catalogs along racial lines to cater to customers who want a child who looks like they do. I ask how we can articulate reluctance to embrace this race-conscious approach. I draw an analogy to a 1964 Supreme Court case striking down a law requiring that each candidate’s race be printed next to his name on the ballot. The “vice” of racialized ballots, the Court held, is not just that they “arouse[]” bigotry, but also that they reinforce a divisive conception of citizenship that race should be “an important, perhaps paramount, consideration” in democratic participation. It is similar, I argue, with donor catalogs: by underscoring race, they credentialize a troubling view that same-race families are preferable to multiracial ones. I distinguish four variously salient ways to disclose donor race and propose choice-structuring mechanisms to balance reproductive privacy, decisional autonomy, and racial identity against the conditions that divide us.
Upper limb rehabilitation and evaluation of stroke patients using robot-aided techniques

This work presents two robot devices for use in the rehabilitation of upper limb movements and reports the quantitative parameters obtained to characterize the rate of improvement thus allowing a precise monitoring of the patient's recovery. Two groups of chronic post-stroke patients were enrolled in a 3-week rehabilitation program including standard physical therapy plus treatment by means of robot devices respectively for wrist and elbow-shoulder movements. Both groups were evaluated by means of standard clinical assessment scales and a new robot measured evaluation metrics. After treatment, both groups improved their motor deficit and disability. The new evaluation metrics proposed should allow the therapist to implement targeted rehabilitative strategies and, if necessary, prompt adjustment of the treatment.
Vision based road surface detection for automotive systems

Advance information about the road surface a vehicle is going to encounter can improve the performance of automotive systems. For e.g. the initial slip cycles caused by the Antilock Braking Systems (ABS) could be avoided, if it is already known that the vehicle is on a surface having a low coefficient of friction (μ). In this paper, an algorithm is developed that detects different road surfaces using streaming video acquired from a camera mounted on the hood of the vehicle. The road surfaces detected here are asphalt road, cement road, sandy road, rough asphalt road (asphalt road which is deteriorating), grassy road and rough road. The value of coefficient of friction (μ) is also given out with the detected surfaces to obtain additional information about the road surfaces. Split μ (a road having different μ conditions on the left and right side of the vehicle) and μ jump (different μ conditions on the front and rear of the vehicle) are also pre detected. One method was not sufficient to achieve the goals of this algorithm. Here several simple techniques like the Canny edge algorithm, intensity histogram, contours, Hough transform and image segmentation were employed. To prevent misdetections, the road surface detection during high motion blur is prohibited. Open Source Computer Vision developed by Intel is used for the implementation of the above mentioned methods.
RNS Reverse Converters for Moduli Sets With Dynamic Ranges up to $(8n+1)$ -bit

In the last years, investigation on residue number systems (RNS) has targeted parallelism and larger dynamic ranges. In this paper, we start from the moduli set {2n,2n-1,2n+1,2n-2(n+1)/2+1,2n+2(n+1)/2+1} , with an equivalent 5n -bit dynamic range, and propose horizontal and vertical extensions in order to improve the parallelism and increase the dynamic range. The vertical extensions increase the value of the power-of-2 modulus in the five-moduli set. With the horizontal extensions, new six channel sets are allowed by introducing the 2n+1+1 or 2n-1+1 moduli. This paper proposes methods to design memoryless reverse converters for the proposed moduli sets with large dynamic ranges, up to (8n+1)-bit. Due to the complexity of the reverse conversion, both the Chinese Remainder Theorem and the Mixed Radix Conversion are applied in the proposed methods to derive efficient reverse converters. Experimental results suggest that the proposed vertical extensions allow to reduce the area-delay-product up to 1.34 times in comparison with the related state-of-the-art. The horizontal extensions allow larger and more balanced moduli sets, resulting in an improvement of the RNS arithmetic computation, at the cost of lower reverse conversion performance.
Multi user MIMO performance applied to UMTS HSDPA

The aspects of applying MIMO techniques to the UMTS HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) transmission, assuming a multi-user scenario, are introduced. The Shannon capacity measure, working as the uplink transmitted channel metric, performs a major role - namely in transmission rate determination, frame error rate estimation, and scheduling at node B.
Disputes, Stakes and Game Involvement: Facing Death in Computer Gaming

Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting. Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafes (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures. Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether. Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.