Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modification of Estimates of Parameters in the Construction of Genetic Selection Indices ('Bending')

A method, termed 'bending', is proposed for the modification of the estimates of genetic (G) and phenotypic (P) covariance matrices, that are used in the construction of genetic selection indices for two or more traits. If P and G are estimated from the betweenand within-class covariance matrices, B and W respectively, in a one-way multivariate analysis of variance, then the method consists of contracting all the eigenvalues of the matrix product W-1B towards their mean but with the corresponding eigenvectors unchanged. The usefulness of the modification procedure is investigated by Monte Carlo simulation and Taylor series approximation methods. In general, the modification procedure improves the achieved response to selection, with the amount of improvement dependent on the (unknown) population parameters and the size of sample for estimation. In practice, there is some difficulty in selecting the value of the 'bending' factor; some very simple methods of doing this are proposed. If some of the parameter estimates are known to be defective (outside their valid limits), a simple and effective method for the selection of the 'bending' factor is to contract the eigenvalues so that they are all nonnegative.
4E-BPs Control Fat Storage by Regulating the Expression of Egr1 and ATGL*

Background: Insulin suppresses lipolysis in adipocytes by inducing Egr1 that inhibits expression of ATGL. Results: Stimulation of mTORC1 or genetic ablation of 4E-BP1/2 increase expression of Egr1 regardless of its mRNA levels. Conclusion: Regulation of Egr1 by insulin takes place predominantly at the level of translation via mTORC1/4E-BP. Significance: Translational control of the Egr1 expression explains the role of mTORC1 in regulation of lipolysis. Early growth response transcription factor Egr1 controls multiple aspects of cell physiology and metabolism. In particular, Egr1 suppresses lipolysis and promotes fat accumulation in adipocytes by inhibiting the expression of adipose triglyceride lipase. According to current dogma, regulation of the Egr1 expression takes place primarily at the level of transcription. Correspondingly, treatment of cultured adipocytes with insulin stimulates expression of Egr1 mRNA and protein. Unexpectedly, the MEK inhibitor PD98059 completely blocks insulin-stimulated increase in the Egr1 mRNA but has only a moderate effect on the Egr1 protein. At the same time, mTORC1 inhibitors rapamycin and PP242 suppress expression of the Egr1 protein and have an opposite effect on the Egr1 mRNA. Mouse embryonic fibroblasts with genetic ablations of TSC2 or 4E-BP1/2 express less Egr1 mRNA but more Egr1 protein than wild type controls. 35S-labeling has confirmed that translation of the Egr1 mRNA is much more effective in 4E-BP1/2-null cells than in control. A selective agonist of the CB1 receptors, ACEA, up-regulates Egr1 mRNA, but does not activate mTORC1 and does not increase Egr1 protein in adipocytes. These data suggest that although insulin activates both the Erk and the mTORC1 signaling pathways in adipocytes, regulation of the Egr1 expression takes place predominantly via the mTORC1/4E-BP-mediated axis. In confirmation of this model, we show that 4E-BP1/2-null MEFs express less ATGL and accumulate more fat than control cells, while knock down of Egr1 in 4E-BP1/2-null MEFs increases ATGL expression and decreases fat storage.
Image magnification using decimated orthogonal wavelet transform

Wavelet transforms computed by the decimated Mallat's ( see A Wavelet Tour on Signal Processing. Academic Press, 2nd ed., 1999) algorithm present a pyramidal aspect. This pyramidal analysis combined with a prediction of high-frequency coefficients is used to produce a magnified signal. The prediction is based on a zero-crossings representation and on the construction of a multiscale edge-signature database. Performances are evaluated for synthetic-noisy and natural images. A improvement regarding some classical methods is observed.
Mutational Analysis of the Ribosomal Protein Rpl10 from Yeast*

Yeast Rpl10 belongs to the L10e family of ribosomal proteins. In the large (60 S) subunit, Rpl10 is positioned in a cleft between the central protuberance and the GTPase-activating center. It is loaded into the 60 S subunit at a late step in maturation. We have shown previously that Rpl10 is required for the release of the Crm1-dependent nuclear export adapter Nmd3, an event that also requires the cytoplasmic GTPase Lsg1. Here we have carried out an extensive mutational analysis of Rpl10 to identify mutations that would allow us to map activities to distinct domains of the protein to begin to understand the molecular interaction between Rpl10 and Nmd3. We found that mutations in a central loop (amino acids 102–112) had a significant impact on the release of Nmd3. This loop is unstructured in the crystal and solution structures of prokaryotic Rpl10 orthologs. Thus, the loop is not necessary for stable interaction of Rpl10 with the ribosome, suggesting that it plays a dynamic role in ribosome function or regulating the association of other factors. We also found that mutant Rpl10 proteins were engineered to be unable to bind to the ribosome accumulated in the nucleus. This was unexpected and may suggest a nuclear role for Rpl10.
Smoothing technique for nonsmooth composite minimization with linear operator

We introduce and analyze an algorithm for the minimization of convex functions that are the sum of differentiable terms and proximable terms composed with linear operators. The method builds upon the recently developed smoothed gap technique. In addition to a precise convergence rate result, valid even in the presence of linear inclusion constraints, this new method allows an explicit treatment of the gradient of differentiable functions and can be enhanced with line-search. We also study the consequences of restarting the acceleration of the algorithm at a given frequency. These new features are not classical for primal-dual methods and allow us to solve difficult large-scale convex optimization problems. We numerically illustrate the superior performance of the algorithm on basis pursuit, TV-regularized least squares regression and L1 regression problems against the state-of-the-art.
Influence of the serotonin transporter gene on comorbid disorders among alcohol-dependent individuals

Objective The role of the human serotonin transporter protein (5-HTT) gene in psychiatric disorders suggests that its variation may influence the comorbidity pattern and the heterogeneity of alcoholism. The aim of the present study is to verify possible associations between the 5-HTTLPR control region polymorphism with alcoholism and comorbid disorders. Methods The polymorphic site was genotyped in 114 patients with alcohol dependence and 218 controls, all of them Brazilians of European descent. A comprehensive diagnostic interview identified the comorbid disorders. Results Study participants with alcohol dependence and controls did not differ in the genotype and allele frequencies (genotypes: χ2=2.52, P=0.28; alleles: χ2=0.37; P=0.54). Patients with comorbid major depressive disorder (χ2=6.14, P=0.01), drug abuse (χ2=6.82, P=0.01) and nicotine dependence (χ2=4.10, P=0.04), however, presented a higher frequency of the S allele than patients without these comorbidities. Patients with comorbid depression and drug abuse also presented a higher frequency of the S allele than controls. Conclusions The present results are consistent with the importance of the 5-HTT gene in psychiatry. They suggest a role of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in a group of comorbid disorders among alcohol-dependent individuals, supporting a genetic influence in alcoholism heterogeneity.
Nanowire-Photonic Crystal Waveguide Hybrid Structure

We propose a class of nanocavities by combining nanowires and photonic crystal waveguides. Three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain techniques have been used to study the structures, and the simulation results show it is easy to achieve nanocavities with mode volumes less than 2(lambda/n)3 and Q values over 106 .
Evaluation of Mechanical Properties and Formaldehyde Emission of Plywood Manufactured for Construction Applications

This study was aimed to evaluate some mechanical properties and formaldehyde emission of beech plywood panels manufactured from rotary cut veneers using phenol–formaldehyde (PF) resin. Six plywood panels of 5 plies with 15 mm thickness were manufactured. Modulus of rupture (MOR), modulus of elasticity (MOE) and formaldehyde emission values were determined. The values of MOR and MOE were higher than the EN requirements. Furthermore, the formaldehyde emission values measured by the European small-scale chamber (EN 7171) and gas analysis (EN 717-2) methods were lower than the E1-emmison class. The results showed signifi cant variations (P<0.001) among beech plywood panels, most of them caused by sample heterogeneity, and inconsistency of the values was related to the inter-panel variation. Moreover, a strongly positive correlation between the formaldehyde emission values measured by EN 717-1 and 717-2 methods was found (R2 value of 0.87).
Self‐similar characteristics of network intrusion attempts and the implications for predictability

One way of proactively detecting multistage attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), worms and coordinated spamming is to profile hosts that engage in scanning activity and predict their future actions, which is a difficult challenge. We attempt to better understand this challenge by hypothesising that network intrusion attempts exhibit self‐similar characteristics. We analyse logs from the DShield repository of globally distributed IDS alerts corresponding to the first 2 weeks of January 2005 and present three pieces of evidence in favour of this hypothesis. First, we observed that the persistence of hosts that attempt network intrusions obey a power‐law relationship such that the overwhelming majority of hosts are short‐lived whereas a small number are highly persistent. Second, the distribution of hosts in the IP address space is broadly identical regardless of different categories of lifetimes and intrusion attempts. Finally, there is a scale invariant diurnal cycle with long‐range dependence in the number of unique hosts observed per unit time. The overall implication of these findings is that any predictive model must account for identical statistical characteristics regardless of the volumetric, spatiotemporal and categorical resolution of the observations used to build and train that model. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The impact of stress on fertility treatment

Purpose of review The goal of this review was to summarize the recent research on the relationship between stress and assisted reproductive technology treatment. Recent findings Women and men with infertility report high levels of distress that can impact their quality of life. There are numerous psychosocial interventions, including cognitive behavior therapy and/or self-help ones, which may decrease distress, increase patient retention and improve pregnancy rates. Summary Patient distress is an important factor to consider. Decreasing burden of care may lead to significant improvements in assisted reproductive technology outcome.
Morphing Switched-Capacitor Converters With Variable Conversion Ratio

High-voltage-gain and wide-input-range dc-dc converters are widely used in various electronics and industrial products such as portable devices, telecommunication, automotive, and aerospace systems. The two-stage converter is a widely adopted architecture for such applications, and it is proven to have a higher efficiency as compared with that of the single-stage converter. This paper presents a modular-cell-based morphing switched-capacitor (SC) converter for application as a front-end converter of the two-stage converter. The conversion ratio of this converter is flexible and variable and can be freely extended by increasing more SC modules. The varying conversion ratio is achieved through the morphing of the converter's structure corresponding to the amplitude of the input voltage. This converter is light and compact, and is highly efficient over a very wide range of input voltage and load conditions. Experimental work on a 25-W, 6-30-V input, 3.5-8.5-V output prototype, is performed. For a single SC module, the efficiency over the entire input voltage range is higher than 98%. Applied into the two-stage converter, the overall efficiency achievable over the entire operating range is 80% including the driver's loss.
Automated recognition and mapping of immunolabelled neurons in the developing brain

The cerebral cortex is distinguished by layers of neurons of different morphologies and densities. The layers are formed by the migration of newly generated neurons from the ventricular zone to the cortical plate near the outer (pial) boundary of the cortex, along radial paths approximately perpendicular to the cortical surface. Immunochemical labelling makes these cells’ patterns visible in brightfield microscopy so that layer formation can be studied. We developed a suite of programs that automatically digitize the entire cortex, identify the labelled cells and compute cell densities along local radial paths. Cell identification used supervised classification on all the significantly stained objects corresponding to maxima in lowpass filtered versions of the digital micrographs. Classification of all the stained objects as cells or noncell objects was made by a decision rule based on morphometric and grey‐level texture features, including features based on Gabor functions. Detection sensitivity and classification accuracy were jointly maximized on training data consisting of about 3000 expert‐identified neurons in micrographs. Total program performance was tested on a separate (test) set of labelled neurons the same size as the training data set. The program detected 85% of the cells in the test set with a total error of 019. The identified cells’ locations were used to compute population densities along normals to the cortical layers, and these densities served as a measure of neuronal migration. Transcortical density profiles obtained by computation and by manual cell counting were very similar. The cell identification program was built on well‐established methods in statistical pattern recognition and image analysis and should generalize readily to other histological preparations.
Automatic program generation with genetic network programming using subroutines

Genetic Network Programming with Automatic Program Generation (GNP-APG) is an evolutionary algorithm to generate programs. Genotype-phenotype mapping technology is introduced in this algorithm to create legal programs. With the help of graph-based structures of Genetic Network Programming (GNP), GNP-APG can efficiently generate robust programs to cope with problems. In this paper, the extended algorithm of GNP-APG is proposed which can create a hierarchy program, in other words, a program which contains a main function and subroutines. The proposed method works like Automatic Defined Functions (ADFs) in Genetic Programming (GP). By using subroutines, a complex program can be decomposed to several simple programs which are obtained more easily. Moreover, these subroutines might be called many times, which results in reducing the size of the program significantly. In simulations, different tile-worlds between the training phase and testing phase are used for performance evaluations and the results shows that GNP-APG with subroutines (GNP-APGsr) could have better performances than GNP-APG.
Schizophrenia: manifestations, incidence and course in different cultures. A World Health Organization ten-country study.

This monograph presents the findings of a WHO Collaborative Study on the Determinants of Outcome of Severe Mental Disorders (DOS). The study was designed to investigate further some of the findings of the WHO International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS) which produced the unexpected finding that patients suffering from schizophrenia in the centres in developing countries appear to have a more favourable outcome at both two and five years follow-up than initially similar patients in centres in developed countries. The DOS was carried out in field centres in Aarhus (Denmark), Agra and Chandigarh (India), Cali (Columbia), Dublin (Ireland), Honolulu and Rochester (United States of America), Ibadan (Nigeria), Moscow (USSR), Nagasaki (Japan), Nottingham (United Kingdom), and Prague (Czechoslovakia). Six of these centres had also taken part in the IPSS. One of the major achievements of the IPSS had been the demonstration that large-scale cross-cultural studies using standardized methods of interviewing, symptom rating and diagnosis are possible. The study reported here rested upon the same methodological foundations but used an epidemiological approach. In each of the twelve centres of the DOS, all individuals from a defined catchment area making a lifetime first contact with specified psychiatric, medical or other agencies because of symptoms of a possibly schizophrenic illness were identified, assessed, and followed up for two years. The finding of a better outcome of patients in developing countries was confirmed, as was the existence of a substantial proportion of patients (often more than half) with undoubted initial schizophrenic symptoms but a good outcome at two years. About one-third of all patients in the study were never admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and of those that were admitted the majority were in hospital for only short periods. The Study also produced
Relaxation training and attention placebo in the treatment of severe insomnia.

This study compared the effectiveness of progressive relaxation training with and without a supplementary relaxation recording, which the subjects played at home, and an attention placebo manipulation in the modification of severe insomnia in adult volunteers. The results indicated that the relaxation training procedures were significantly more effective than placebo and no-treatment controls in modifying several parameters of sleeping behavior, in reducing consumption of sleep-inducing medication, and in influencing a self-report anxiety measure. The supplementary relaxation tape did not increase the effectiveness of relaxation training conducted in the clinic, and there was no difference in the efficacy of the placebo and no-treatment conditions. Physiological data gathered during the last treatment session indicated few significant correlations between reductions in arousal associated with relaxation training and treatment outcome. Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in the treatment of insomnia from a behavioral framework. Case studies and uncontrolled group investigations suggesting the effectiveness of relaxation training techniques and stimulus control procedures (Bootzin, 1972; Geer & Katkin, 1966; Jacobson, 1964; Kahn, Baker, & Weiss, 1968) have given rise to controlled studies. Thus far this research has indicated that relaxation training procedures are effective in modifying several parameters of sleeping behavior in volunteer insomniacs. However, the mechanism(s) by which this training operates have not been clearly identified. One possibility is that this technique works because of its placebo value. Relaxation training would seem to have high face validity for the treatment of insomnia, and the impressive proprioceptive muscle feedback often associated with the technique may add to its credibility, Although a number of studies have attempted to investigate this issue (Borkovec & Fowles, 1973; Borkovec, Kaloupek, & Slama, 197S; Borkovec, Steinmark, & Nan, 1973; Haynes, Woodward, Moron, & Alex
Great Expectations: Prospect Theory with a Consistent Reference Point

This paper introduces a prospect theory model of risk preferences with an endogenously determined expectation that serves simultaneously as both the reference point for and the certainty equivalent of a lottery. This model accommodates a number of psychologically motivated and empirically observed risk preferences. We show that an agent can always form a consistent expectation for any gamble and derive a parametric formula for binary gambles, which can then be used to examine the effects of loss aversion, risk aversion, and probability weighting on behavior under risk. To illustrate the applicability of the results, we use this model to consider the incentives of an agent purchasing insurance against the possibility of a loss and show that it is optimal for him to either purchase full insurance or purchase no insurance.
Cardiac and vascular KATP channels in rats are activated by endogenous epoxyeicosatrienoic acids through different mechanisms

We have reported that epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs), the cytochrome P450 (CYP) epoxygenase metabolites of arachidonic acid (AA), are potent sarcolemmal ATP‐sensitive K+ (KATP) channel activators. However, activation of cardiac and vascular KATP channels by endogenously produced EETs under physiological intracellular conditions has not been demonstrated and direct comparison of the mechanisms whereby EETs activate the KATP channels in cardiac myocytes versus vascular smooth muscle cells has not been made. In this study, we examined the effects of AA on KATP channels in freshly isolated cardiac myocytes from rats, wild‐type (WT) and transgenic mice overexpressing CYP2J2 cDNA, and mesenteric arterial smooth muscle cells from rats. We also compared the activation of cardiac and vascular KATP channels by extracellularly and intracellularly applied 11,12‐EET. We found that 1 μm AA enhanced KATP channel activities in both cardiac and vascular smooth muscle cells, and the AA effects were inhibited by preincubation with CYP epoxygenase inhibitors. Baseline cardiac KATP current densities in CYP2J2 transgenic mice were 190% higher than those of WT mice, and both were reduced to similar levels by CYP epoxygenase inhibition. Western blot analysis showed that expression of Kir6.2 and SUR2A was similar between WT and CYP2J2 transgenic hearts. 11,12‐EET (5 μm) applied intracellularly enhanced the KATP currents by 850% in cardiac myocytes, but had no effect in vascular smooth muscle cells. In contrast, 11,12‐EET (5 μm) applied extracellularly increased KATP currents by 520% in mesenteric arterial smooth muscle cells, but by only 209% in cardiac myocytes. Preincubation with 100 μmm‐iodobenzylguanidine or 5 μm myristoylated PKI amide did not alter the activation of cardiac KATP channels by 5 μm 11,12‐EET, but significantly inhibited activation of vascular KATP channels. Moreover, EET only enhanced the inward component of cardiac KATP currents, but activated both the inward and outward components of vascular KATP currents. Our results indicate that endogenously derived CYP metabolites of AA potently activate cardiac and vascular KATP channels. EETs regulate cardiac electrophysiology and vascular tone by KATP channel activation, albeit through different mechanisms: the cardiac KATP channels are directly activated by EETs, whereas activation of the vascular KATP channels by EETs is protein kinase A dependent.