Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Melanocortin 1-receptor ( MC 1R ) gene polymorphisms associated with chicken E locus alleles

s of papers 9 Saturday, AM, GENETICS 34 Melanocortin 1-receptor (MC1-R) gene polymorphisms associated with chicken E locus alleles. R. Okimoto*1, A. E. Ellett1, and S. Takeuchi2, 1University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, 2Okayama University, Okayama, Japan. The melanocortin 1-receptor (MC1-R) gene has been associated with E locus phenotypes in chickens and has been mapped to the E30 linkage group of the East Lansing reference population. Variant alleles of the E locus are important for accurate down color sexing and also for the inhibition of unwanted tissue pigmentation in broilers. PAMSA (PCR Amplification of Multiple Specific Alleles) tests for various replacement substitutions found in the published E allele sequences gave unexpected results when tested against known alleles of the E locus. To resolve these issues and gain a better understanding of how replacement substitutions in the MC1-R gene are affecting E locus phenotypes we PCR cloned and sequenced a number of accessions of the e+, eb, wheaten (eWh and ey), and the birchin (ER) alleles. Our results indicate that the published e+ allele is likely to be a wheaten sequence. All 3 new wheaten sequences (New Hampshire Reds, Rhode Island Reds, and Buff Minorca) produced an inferred amino acid sequence that was identical to the publish e+ sequence, but all three of our new e+ sequences (two Red Junglefowl accessions and Welsummer) had a Thr143Ala polymorphism. All E alleles sequenced except for the wheaten alleles have Thr143, indicating that the Ala143 mutation may be associated with restriction of black pigment in the feathers. The 2 recessive eb sequences (Smyth Brown Line and commercial broiler) had the Lys92 mutation associated with extended black in both chickens and mice, but they also had a His215Pro substitution. The Pro215 mutation is a likely candidate to attenuate the Lys92 mutation producing a brown instead of a black female. The Leghorn birchin allele had the Lys92 mutation, but the Fayoumi birchin allele did not. Instead the Fayoumi sequence had a Leu133Gln substitution, indicating that the birchin phenotype has at least two distinct alleles associated with it.
“It’s Easier When It’s Personal”: What Made Reading Real for Two Tweens with Learning Disabilities

Through a series of interviews with teachers, parents, and the students themselves, this article explores the unique experiences of how two African American adolescent readers with learning disabilities made personal connections to literature during their middle school years. Participant voices then tell the story of how these two individuals became more motivated readers in early adolescence, an occurrence that coincided with measurable gains in reading achievement.
SPARC-null mice exhibit lower intraocular pressures.

PURPOSE SPARC is a matricellular protein that is highly expressed in remodeling tissues, including the trabecular meshwork and ciliary body. The hypothesis for the study was that SPARC contributes to the regulation of intraocular pressure (IOP). The IOPs of SPARC-null mice, their corresponding wild-type (WT), and heterozygous animals were compared. METHODS Diurnal and nocturnal IOPs of C57Bl/6x129SvJ WT, SPARC-null, and heterozygous mice were measured. Fluorophotometric measurements were made to assess aqueous turnover. Central corneal thickness (CCT) was measured using histology, ultrasound biomicroscopy, and optical coherence tomography. Iridocorneal angles were examined using light microscopy (LM). RESULTS During the day, the mean IOP of SPARC-null mice (n = 142, 16.9 +/- 2.4 mm Hg) was lower than that of both WT mice (n = 104, 19.9 +/- 2.9 mm Hg; P < 10(-12)), and heterozygotes (n = 38, 19.3 +/- 2.5 mm Hg; P < 10(-4)). At night, SPARC-null mice also exhibited a blunted increase in IOP in comparison to WT and heterozygous mice. CCTs were not significantly different between WT and SPARC-null mice. Heterozygous mice tended to have thicker corneas (3.4%). Fluorophotometric measurements suggest that aqueous turnover rates in SPARC-null mice are equal to if not greater than rates in WT mice. LM of the SPARC-null iridocorneal angle revealed morphology that is indistinguishable from WT. CONCLUSIONS SPARC-null mice have lower IOPs than do their WT counterparts with equal CCTs. The rate of aqueous turnover suggests that the mechanism is enhanced outflow resistance.
Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black hole with gravitational Chern-Simons term: Thermodynamics and statistical entropy

Recently, the Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole in the presence of the gravitational Chern-Simons term has been studied, and it is found that the usual thermodynamic quantities, like the black hole mass, angular momentum, and entropy, are modified. But, for large values of the gravitational Chern-Simons coupling where the modification terms dominate the original terms some exotic behaviors occur, like the roles of the mass and angular momentum are interchanged and the entropy depends more on the inner horizon area than the outer one. A basic physical problem of this system is that the form of entropy does not guarantee the second law of thermodynamics, in contrast to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Moreover, this entropy does not agree with the statistical entropy, in contrast to a good agreement for small values of the gravitational Chern-Simons coupling. Here I find that there is another entropy formula where the usual Bekenstein-Hawking form dominates the inner-horizon term again, as in the small gravitational Chern-Simons coupling case, such that the second law of thermodynamics can be guaranteed. I also find that the new entropy formula agrees with the statistical entropy based on the holographic anomalies for the whole range of the gravitational Chern-Simons coupling. This reproduces,more » in the limit of a vanishing Einstein-Hilbert term, the recent result about the exotic BTZ black holes, where their masses and angular momenta are completely interchanged and the entropies depend only on the area of the inner horizon. I compare the result of the holographic approach with the classical-symmetry-algebra-based approach, and I find exact agreements even with the higher-derivative corrections of the gravitational Chern-Simons term. This provides a nontrivial check of the AdS/CFT correspondence, in the presence of higher-derivative terms in the gravity action. « less
Structure and performance of a dependency language model

Abstract : We present a maximum entropy language model that incorporates both syntax and semantics via a dependency grammar. Such a grammar expresses the relations between words by a directed graph. Because the edges of this graph may connect words that are arbitrarily far apart in a sentence, this technique can incorporate the predictive power of words that lie outside of bigram or trigram range. we have built several simple dependency models, as we call them, and tested them in a speech recognition experiment. We report experimental results for these models here, including one that has a small but statistically significant advantage (p .02) over a digram language model.
An Introductory Approach to Risk Visualization as a Service

This paper introduces the Risk Visualization as a Service (RVaaS) and presents the motivation, rationale, methodology, Cloud APIs used, operations and examples of using RVaaS. Risks can be calculated within seconds and presented in the form of Visualization to ensure that unexploited areas are ex-posed. RVaaS operates in two phases. The first phase includes the risk modeling in Black Scholes Model (BSM), creating 3D Visualization and Analysis. The second phase consists of calculating key derivatives such as Delta and Theta for financial modeling. Risks presented in visualization allow the potential investors and stakeholders to keep track of the status of risk with regard to time, prices and volatility. Our approach can improve accuracy and performance. Results in experiments show that RVaaS can perform up to 500,000 simulations and complete all simulations within 24 seconds for time steps of up to 50. We also introduce financial stock market analysis (FSMA) that can fully blend with RVaaS and demonstrate two examples that can help investors make better decision based on the pricing and market volatility information. RVaaS provides a structured way to deploy low cost, high quality risk assessment and support real-time calculations.
SRM inverter topologies: a comparative evaluation

Five inverter power circuits suitable for switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives are analyzed. The peak voltage and current ratings of the power switches and the size and peak ratings of the DC link components of each circuit are compared. As an example, a converter analysis and selection are performed for a high-speed, 6/2 SRM, suitable for a spindle drive, and a high-torque, 8/6 motor. Experimental results obtained for a high-torque drive are presented. Of the five circuits, only two are found suitable for industrial SRM drives, supplied from 380 or 460 V AC lines. The remaining circuits all use dual rail topology, requiring that the inverter active devices have a rating at least twice the motor supply voltage. A discussion of basic motor requirements is included. <<ETX>>
Design for Fire Resistance of FRP Concrete Structures Based on Numerical Models

Widespread deterioration of infrastructure resulting from corrosion of reinforcing steel in concrete has led recently to the use of fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) in a number of infrastructure applications. A significant research effort over the past fifteen years has shown that FRP materials can be effectively employed to reinforce and/or strengthen deteriorated or under-strength reinforced concrete structures. However, the performance of FRP materials in fire remains a serious concern, which needs to be addressed before these materials can be used with confidence in applications where fire endurance is a design criterion (i.e. buildings, parking garages, etc.). This report presents a design for fire resistance of FRP concrete structures.
The unprecedented optical outburst of the quasar 3C 454.3 - The WEBT campaign of 2004–2005

Context. The radio quasar 3C 454.3 underwent an exceptional optical outburst lasting more than 1 year and culminating in spring 2005. The maximum brightness detected was $R=12.0$, which represents the most luminous quasar state thus far observed ($M_B \sim -31.4$). Aims. In order to follow the emission behaviour of the source in detail, a large multiwavelength campaign was organized by the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT). Methods. Continuous optical, near-IR and radio monitoring was performed in several bands. ToO pointings by the Chandra and INTEGRAL satellites provided additional information at high energies in May 2005. Results. The historical radio and optical light curves show different behaviours. Until about 2001.0 only moderate variability was present in the optical regime, while prominent and long-lasting radio outbursts were visible at the various radio frequencies, with higher-frequency variations preceding the lower-frequency ones. After that date, the optical activity increased and the radio flux is less variable. This suggests that the optical and radio emissions come from two separate and misaligned jet regions, with the inner optical one acquiring a smaller viewing angle during the 2004-2005 outburst. Moreover, the colour-index behaviour (generally redder-when-brighter) during the outburst suggests the presence of a luminous accretion disc. A huge mm outburst followed the optical one, peaking in June-July 2005. The high-frequency (37-43 GHz) radio flux started to increase in early 2005 and reached a maximum at the end of our observing period (end of September 2005). VLBA observations at 43 GHz during the summer confirm the brightening of the radio core and show an increasing polarization. An exceptionally bright X-ray state was detected in May 2005, corresponding to the rising mm flux and suggesting an inverse-Compton nature of the hard X-ray spectrum. Conclusions. A further multifrequency monitoring effort is needed to follow the next phases of this unprecedented event.
Validity and reliability of the Turkish Version of the Self-Disclosure Scale among university students

Objective: Self-disclosure plays an active role in the beginning of interpersonal communication, in the formation of intimacy, and in the trust of the communicators each other. In this study, it is aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of Self-Disclosure Scale. Methods: A total of 274 nursing and medical university students were included in this study between May-June 2016. The data were collected using The Sociodemographic Information Form and the Self-Disclosure Scale. Exploratory factor analysis with a varimax rotation was used to examine the construct validity. Reliability was evaluated using Cronbach a coefficients and item-total subscale correlations. The stability of the measures was examined through testretest reliability assessment. Results: As a result of exploratory factor analysis, five factors with 64.45% of the variance explained and an eigenvalue >1 were extracted. Factor loading of items are between 0.53 and 0.86. The Cronbachs alpha coefficient value for the scale is 0.70, and test-retest reliability coefficient value is 0.89. Conclusion: Self-Disclosure Scale is a valid and reliable instrument to evaluate self-disclosure level among university students.
Isolating a cerebellar contribution to rapid visual attention using transcranial magnetic stimulation

Patient and neuroimaging research have provided increasing support for a role of the posterior-lateral cerebellum in cognition, particularly attention. During rapid serial visual presentation, when two targets are presented in close temporal proximity (<500 ms), accuracy at detecting the second target (T2) suffers. This phenomenon is known as the attentional blink (AB), and in cerebellar lesion patients this effect is exaggerated. Damage to the cerebellum may thus disrupt the use of attentional resources during stimulus processing conditions that are temporally demanding. There are reciprocal connections between the cerebral cortex and the contralateral cerebellum, these connections allow for the possibility that lateralized functions in the cerebral cortex (such as language) remain lateralized in the cerebellum. The purpose of this study was to investigate the temporal characteristics of the cerebellar contribution to the AB and to functionally localize the contribution of the cerebellum to the AB using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We hypothesized that T2 accuracy would decrease after right cerebellar stimulation when the delay between the first target (T1) and T2 was short (120–400 ms) compared to long (720–960 ms). We used continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS), a form of TMS, to transiently inhibit a focal population of neurons in the left and right posterior-lateral cerebellum of healthy participants (n = 45). Three groups of participants (n = 15) performed the AB before and after either sham, left, or right cerebellar stimulation. The results of this cTBS study support our hypothesis. During the short delay, participants in the right cTBS group showed a greater AB magnitude compared to both the left and sham cTBS groups (p < 0.05). No difference in T2 detection was found over long delays. The results provide further support for a cerebellar contribution to an integrated neural network recruited during temporally demanding attention-based tasks.
Towards web-scale how-provenance

The annotation of data with meta-data, and its propagation through data-intensive computation in a way that follows the transformations that the data undergoes (“how-provenance”), has many applications, including explanation of the computation results, assessing their trustworthiness and proving their correctness, evaluation in presence of incomplete or probabilistic information, view maintenance, etc. As data gets bigger, its transformations become more complex, and both are being relegated to the cloud, the role of provenance in these applications is even more crucial. But at the same time, the overhead incurred due to provenance computation, in terms of time, space and communication, may limit the scalability of how-provenance management systems. We envision an approach for addressing this complex problem, through allowing selective tracking of how-provenance, where the selection criteria are partly based on the meta-data itself. We illustrate use-cases in the web context, and highlight some challenges in this respect.
A Wikipedia based Algorithm for Online Adaptation of a Syntactic Parser

Adaptation of models to a new domain is important for many natural language tasks. Because without adaptation, NLP tools trained on news domain achieve sub par results on other domains. In many practical scenarios, the identity of the domain of the test set is unknown. For this difficult but important setting, we propose a novel method of adaptation using entity disambiguation systems to Wikipedia. We get significant improvements for adapting a syntactic parser trained on news domain to biomedical domain.
On the efficient application of compressive sensing of physiological signals in medical diagnostics

Wireless telemonitoring of physiological signals is an evolving direction in personalized medicine and home-based e-Health. There are several constraints in designing such systems. The three important constraints are energy consumption, data compression and device cost. Compressive Sensing (CS) is an emerging data compression technique that overcomes those constraints. Nevertheless, the non-sparsity of physiological signals presents a major issue to the existing compressive sensing algorithms. This research proposes to use a developed compressive sensing algorithm which has the ability to recover such non-sparse physiological signals. This algorithm is Block Sparse Bayesian Learning (BSBL). The proposed algorithm and the conventional CS algorithm were used to compress Fetal ECG (FECG) signals. Results showed that using BSBL to recover non-sparse FECG is more efficient comparing with the conventional CS algorithm, SL0.
Emotional body language displayed by artificial agents

Complex and natural social interaction between artificial agents (computer-generated or robotic) and humans necessitates the display of rich emotions in order to be believable, socially relevant, and accepted, and to generate the natural emotional responses that humans show in the context of social interaction, such as engagement or empathy. Whereas some robots use faces to display (simplified) emotional expressions, for other robots such as Nao, body language is the best medium available given their inability to convey facial expressions. Displaying emotional body language that can be interpreted whilst interacting with the robot should significantly improve naturalness. This research investigates the creation of an affect space for the generation of emotional body language to be displayed by humanoid robots. To do so, three experiments investigating how emotional body language displayed by agents is interpreted were conducted. The first experiment compared the interpretation of emotional body language displayed by humans and agents. The results showed that emotional body language displayed by an agent or a human is interpreted in a similar way in terms of recognition. Following these results, emotional key poses were extracted from an actor's performances and implemented in a Nao robot. The interpretation of these key poses was validated in a second study where it was found that participants were better than chance at interpreting the key poses displayed. Finally, an affect space was generated by blending key poses and validated in a third study. Overall, these experiments confirmed that body language is an appropriate medium for robots to display emotions and suggest that an affect space for body expressions can be used to improve the expressiveness of humanoid robots.
Three-Dimensional Medical CT Image Reconstruction

In this paper, it is provided to reconstruct three dimensional(3D) models of human body by using CT slices and digital images and precisely finding locations of pathological formations such as tumours.3D image CT reconstruction is an attractive field generally in digital image processing techniques, especially in biomedical imaging. It has been strongly developed and practically implemented in almost every modern tomographical modalities but there are many problems which still remain unresolved or can be improved. A project in such area has been alternatively developed in order to master mentioned technology and to develop domestic products partially substituted for very expensive imported facilities and softwares. This paper introduces the implementing fundamental problems in 3D medical image reconstruction for medical imaging such as Marching Cubes¿MC¿ algorithms, usual rendering technique, etc. and designing a software for reconstructing 3D image from a set of CT images, which was built on VTK (Visualization Toolkit) and Visual C++. The result show that the reconstruction program can help to reconstruct series of 2D segmented binary images and display the 3D image of the target object.
A value based framework for provider selection of regional ISPs

To access to the Internet, regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to buy transit service from global ISPs. Provider selection strategies are related closely to ISPs' economic interests. With the growing number of potential transit provider and the flattening topology of the Internet, it's getting harder for ISPs to select upstream provider empirically as before. In this paper, we propose a concept of bargaining power as an important decision-making criterion of ISPs during their provider selection process, and design a value based framework to help ISPs' provider selection based on it. The bargaining power of each involved ISP is computed by applying the Shapley Value based transit value distribution mechanism to each involved traffic flow, taking into consideration the cooperative possibility among ISPs and the market roles these ISPs play, i.e., potential providers or potential competitors. It reflects not only the cost and link level transit performance, geographical constraints, but also includes the influence of interconnection impacts, demand/supply relationships by analyzing the traffic content and commercial relationships among ISPs. We then design a quantitative provider selection framework and instantiate our framework using the operation data of a real-world network, CERNET, a national ISP in China. In addition, we evaluate our provider selection results for CERNET and the experimental results show the effectiveness and practicability of our solution in this paper.
Analytical and simulation studies for Call Admission and resource allocation schemes proposed for WiMAX system

Quality communication over the wireless channel is now promised because of the advent of the broadband wireless. High speed data access is expected to be provided to subscribers through broadband wireless access. We propose a joint Call Admission Control (CAC) and Bandwidth Allocation (BA) for an IEEE 802.16 based WiMAX system. The presented schemes aim to provide QoS support along with a fair resource allocation algorithm for nrtPS traffic. Two strategies for CAC namely Conservative and Non-Conservative have been proposed. Conservative CAC guarantees the QoS requirements for all classes of traffic but is more restrictive and less efficient than the Non-Conservative CAC. The performance for proposed schemes has been studied through both analytical models and simulations.