Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myeloma clonotypic B cells are hampered in their ability to undergo B‐cell differentiation in vitro

Summary. In the peripheral blood (PB) of multiple myeloma (MM) patients, clonotypic B cells are present that express the identical V(D)J rearrangements as the malignant plasma cells in the bone marrow. In the present study, the proliferative capacity of clonotypic B cells from MM patients (n = 10) and the ability to differentiate in vitro was determined using the CD40‐culturing system. For six patients, the presence of clonotypic B cells expressing variant immunoglobulin (Ig) isotypes was assessed by Ig isotype‐specific allele‐specific oligonucleotide reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (ASO‐RT‐PCR) after culturing with CD40L and interleukin 4 (IL‐4). In three out of six patients, clonotypic B cells expressing variant isotypes were detected both before and after culturing. The ability of clonotypic B cells to undergo B‐cell differentiation was studied by abrogating CD40 signalling accompanied by IL‐10 and IL‐2 stimulation, enhancing differentiation towards Ig‐secreting cells. The numbers of clonotypic B cells were determined by quantitative ASO‐PCR. An increase in cell number was observed upon CD40L and IL‐4 stimulation, whereas the relative number of clonotypic B cells was unaltered. In contrast, upon B‐cell differentiation the relative number of clonotypic B cells decreased. In conclusion, clonotypic B cells can be cultured and isolated in vitro using the CD40 system. Clonotypic B cells responded to CD40 triggering in a similar fashion as to non‐clonotypic normal B cells. However, the ability of clonotypic B cells to undergo in vitro activation and differentiation into Ig‐secreting cells is hampered.
Sensitivity and specificity of bedside ultrasonography in the diagnosis of fractures of the fifth metacarpal

Objectives Ultrasonography is becoming increasingly common in the diagnosis of fracture in emergency medicine. The aim of our study was to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of sonographic examinations for diagnosing fifth metacarpal fractures. Methods A prospective study was performed of consecutive patients aged >14 years admitted to the emergency department with hand trauma and tenderness over the fifth metacarpal. Anteroposterior and oblique plain x-rays were taken on all patients. Emergency physicians performed bedside sonographic examination. The x-rays were reported by an orthopaedic surgeon who was blinded to the sonographic examination findings. The orthopaedic surgeon’s report was considered the gold standard unless a CT scan was performed. In the single case where this occurred, the CT scan report was considered the gold standard. Results Eighty one patients were included in the study, 39 of whom had fractures. Sonographic examination identified the fractures in 38 patients. One occult fracture undetected by plain radiography, later shown on CT scan, was identified by sonographic examination. There were three cases with false positive ultrasound findings. The sensitivity of the diagnosis of fifth metacarpal fractures by ultrasonography was 97.4% (95% CI 84.9% to 99.9%), specificity was 92.9% (95% CI 79.4% to 98.1%), positive likelihood ratio (LR) was 14 (95% CI 4.58 to 41), negative LR was 0.03 (95% CI 0.00 to 0.19), negative predictive value was 97.5% (95% CI 85.3% to 99.9%) and positive predictive value was 92.6% (95% CI 79% to 98.1%). Conclusions Sonographic examination can be used as an effective diagnostic tool in patients with fifth metacarpal trauma.
A Grid based Neural Network Execution Service

Grid Computing needs some application scenarios proved by operative implementations that should lead towards profitable real business applications. NeuroGrid represents the first step of a long way to connect the immense area of neural networks and its high potential applications to the fast emerging infrastructure possibilities of Grid computing. Based on the de-facto standard Grid middleware "Globus Toolkit" and the platform independent Java technology NeuroGrid demonstrates a proof-of-concept implementation for training and evaluating neural networks within a Grid environment.
Development of electronic subsystems for a terahertz wireless link

In this paper, a very wide bandwidth frequency tripler and fourth harmonic mixer for a wireless communication link at 300 GHz have been designed. An anti-parallel configuraticn of Schottky diodes has been used for both devices. The fourth harmonic mixing configuration is a good solution when it is difficult to have enough Local Oscillator (LO) power to pump the diodes whereas frequency increases. Conversion Loss (CL) of the tripler is around 15 dB for 65 GHz bandwidth in which the best value is 12 dB for 318 GHz. For the fourth harmonic mixer, the CL obtained is around 18 dB within 41 GHz bandwidth. The best value is 10.2 dB for 301 GHz.
Count Rate Performance of the MicroPET Focus 220 Animal Scanner in Singles Transmission Scanning Mode

Count rate loss in singles transmission scans due to dead time can decrease the accuracy of attenuation correction. In addition, for very low transmission source activities measured attenuation may be affected by noise and background radiation emitted by radioactive lutetium-176 in the scintillator material. The aims of this study were to investigate count rate performance in singles transmission scanning for the microPET Focus 220 animal scanner, to examine the effect of energy window width on noise, scatter and dead time, and to determine the optimal range of activity for accurate attenuation correction. Transmission measurements were performed with a decaying 99mTc point source and using wide (21%) and narrow (4%) energy windows. We observed count rate losses at the detector level and in the front end electronics during energy discrimination. Further losses emerged due to multiplexing at the detector head interface for activities higher than 150 MBq for the wide energy window. Substantial count rate losses during transfer of list mode data from the microPET to the PC were also observed for this condition. Lutetium-176 background caused a significant deviation of measured attenuation for activities lower than 10 MBq for both energy windows. No significant bias due to scatter was introduced when using the wide energy window. We conclude that accurate attenuation data can be obtained with single photon transmission source activity in the range 10 to 150 MBq without requiring deadtime correction.
Temperature dependence of the surface free energy and surface stress: An atomistic calculation for Cu(110)

We propose a method to deduce the free energies ! and stresses " of plane surfaces and solid-liquid interfaces in elemental systems from atomistic simulations involving nonhydrostatically stressed solid phases. The method is applied to compute the temperature dependencies of ! and " for the ! 110" Cu surface using Monte Carlo simulations with an embedded-atom potential. Both quantities decrease with temperature but remain different even near the bulk melting point despite extensive premelting of this surface. This difference is explained by the existence in the premelted surface structure of a solid-liquid interface with relatively small but finite values of ! and " . Separate calculations of the ! 110" solid-liquid interface stress give a negative value, suggesting that this interface is in a state of compression. This study motivates future work on anisotropy of surface/interface free energies and stresses, and on the extension of this method to more complex systems.
Crowdsourcing for Evaluating Machine Translation Quality

The recent popularity of machine translation has increased the demand for the evaluation of translations. However, the traditional evaluation approach, manual checking by a bilingual professional, is too expensive and too slow. In this study, we confirm the feasibility of crowdsourcing by analyzing the accuracy of crowdsourcing translation evaluations. We compare crowdsourcing scores to professional scores with regard to three metrics: translation-score, sentence-score, and system-score. A Chinese to English translation evaluation task was designed using around the NTCIR-9 PATENT parallel corpus with the goal being 5-range evaluations of adequacy and fluency. The experiment shows that the average score of crowdsource workers well matches professional evaluation results. The system-score comparison strongly indicates that crowdsourcing can be used to find the best translation system given the input of 10 source sentence.
p62/SQSTM1 is required for Parkin-induced mitochondrial clustering but not mitophagy; VDAC1 is dispensable for both

Mitochondria sustain damage with aging, and the resulting mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in a number of diseases including Parkinson disease. We recently demonstrated that the E3 ubiquitin ligase Parkin, which is linked to recessive forms of parkinsonism, causes a dramatic increase in mitophagy and a change in mitochondrial distribution, following its translocation from the cytosol to mitochondria. Investigating how Parkin induces these changes may offer insight into the mechanisms that lead to the sequestration and elimination of damaged mitochondria. We report that following Parkin’s translocation from the cytosol to mitochondria, Parkin (but not a pathogenic mutant) promotes the K63-linked polyubiquitination of mitochondrial substrate(s) and recruits the ubiquitin- and LC3-binding protein, p62/SQSTM1, to mitochondria. After its recruitment, p62/SQSTM1 mediates the aggregation of dysfunctional mitochondria through polymerization via its PB1 domain, in a manner analogous to its aggregation of polyubiquitinated proteins. Surprisingly and in contrast to what has been recently reported for ubiquitin-induced pexophagy and xenophagy, p62 appears to be dispensable for mitophagy. Similarly, mitochondrial-anchored ubiquitin is sufficient to recruit p62 and promote mitochondrial clustering, but does not promote mitophagy. Although VDAC1 (but not VDAC2) is ubiquitinated following mitochondrial depolarization, we find VDAC1 cannot fully account for the mitochondrial K63-linked ubiquitin immunoreactivity observed following depolarization, as it is also observed in VDAC1/3-/- mouse embryonic fibroblasts. Additionally, we find VDAC1 and VDAC3 are dispensable for the recruitment of p62, mitochondrial clustering and mitophagy. These results demonstrate that mitochondria are aggregated by p62, following its recruitment by Parkin in a VDAC1-independent manner. They also suggest that proteins other than p62 are likely required for mitophagy downstream of Parkin substrates other than VDAC1.
The effect of volume and duration of prenatal ethanol exposure on neonatal physical and behavioral development.

Recent research on the effects of alcohol use during pregnancy indicate that discontinuing alcohol use mid-pregnancy can prevent or minimize many of the adverse consequences usually observed in the children of women who consume alcohol throughout pregnancy. Few studies have examined the contributions of maternal dose level independent of the duration of drinking during pregnancy. In this study the effects of prenatal dose (volume of maternal alcohol use per week during pregnancy) and duration (exposure throughout pregnancy vs. exposure in the first and second trimesters only) on newborn physical and behavioral development were examined. Dependent measures were cluster scores on the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (BNBAS) at three days, infant birthweight, length, and head circumference. Subjects were infants of obstetric patients at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta who were participating in a study on the effects of alcohol use during pregnancy on infant outcome (n = 149). Subjects were primarily black and of low socioeconomic status. Infants of women who continued to drink throughout pregnancy differed from those of women who did not drink during pregnancy on orientation, (the ability to attend to environmental stimuli), p less than 0.05, autonomic regulation, p less than 0.0002, birthweight, p less than 0.04, length, p less than 0.01, and head circumference, p less than 0.01. Both prenatal alcohol dose, p less than 0.03, and the duration of alcohol exposure, p less than 0.03, independently affected autonomic regulation. A significant interaction was found for birthweight, p less than 0.02, with independent main effects for both dose and duration of exposure, p less than 0.01. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A novel CMOS fully differential inductorless RF bandpass filter

In this paper, a novel CMOS bandpass filter working at 900 MHz is proposed. Through a new high-Q active inductor, this design avoids the use of expensive external or on-chip inductors. Designed in AMS 0.35 /spl mu/m, simulation results in Cadence show that this fully differential bandpass filter can achieve high-Q and tunable central frequency with low power consumption.
Femtosecond free-electron laser by chirped pulse amplification.

In this work we combine elements of chirped pulse amplification techniques, now familiar in solid-state lasers, with an amplifier based upon a seeded free-electron laser (FEL). The resulting device would produce amplified pulses of unprecedented brevity at wavelengths shorter than can be currently obtained by any tunable laser system. We use a subharmonically seeded FEL to illustrate the concept. Radiation from a Ti:sapphire laser is frequency tripled and stretched optically to provide a coherent seed pulse for the FEL. When coupled to an electron beam inside a magnetic wiggler, the seed radiation introduces an additional energy modulation on the electron bunch, which has been prepared with an energy chirp to match the chirp in the optical pulse. The energy modulated electrons are then spatially bunched in a dispersion magnet and introduced to a wiggler configured to be resonant to a harmonic of the seed laser, providing additional frequency multiplication. The coherent radiation produced by these electrons is amplified as it traverses the wiggler and is recompressed optically. The preservation of phase coherence provided by this scheme results in a device which can yield 4-fs pulses with 0.3 mJ at a central wavelength of ca. 8 nm, easily the shortest duration more » of amplified pulses produced by any laser. In this paper we discuss various aspects of the concept, including the generation of short pulses, temporal stretching and compression, and potential applications of the device. The phase distortion during the wide bandwidth FEL amplification is discussed in detail, and is shown to be within the bounds required to produce a 4-fs pulse upon compression. « less
Social Problem Solving and Health.

Counseling psychology is committed to helping people meet the challenges and solve the problems they encounter in daily routines and in stressful circumstances. To a great extent, this holds true for other professional psychology specialties (including clinical, educational and health psychology) as clients usually seek professional assistance in solving the problems they face. Thus, the study of problem-solving abilities—their measurement and correlates—and efficient ways to improve these abilities is of keen interest to clinicians and researchers. Counseling psychology has played an influential role in this area of inquiry. Historically guided by early cognitive-behavioral theorists (D’Zurilla & Goldfried, 1971), counseling psychology contributed essential theoretical refinements (Heppner & Krauskopf, 1987) and measurement tools (Heppner, 1988) that remain landmark events. However, related and subsequent theoretical and empirical contributions—appearing primarily in outlets associated with clinical and health psychology, and in the larger, multidisciplinary literature—have yet to be sufficiently integrated with contributions from counseling psychology. This lack of scholarly integration has not necessarily impeded advancements and applications, but it has thwarted a deeper theoretical understanding of the mechanisms at work in the learning and application of social problem-solving abilities.
Diffraction-enhanced imaging for Achilles tendon lesions: a preliminary study.

BACKGROUND Computed tomography, ultrasonography, and magnetic resonance imaging are useful in the diagnosis of tears of the Achilles tendon, but none are capable of detecting early or small tears. Herein, we applied diffraction-enhanced imaging, a radiographic technique that detects x-ray attenuation and x-ray refraction, to the imaging of compromised Achilles tendons. METHODS Diffraction-enhanced imaging was used to detect incomplete surgically induced tears of the Achilles tendon in nine cadaveric human feet and ankles. RESULTS Complete and significant partial tears were detectable in diffraction-enhanced images as x-ray refraction changes. CONCLUSIONS Although still in the experimental stages, diffraction-enhanced imaging may eventually prove useful for the diagnosis of Achilles tendon tears.
A lifetime optimization mobile data gathering strategy with adaptive compressive sensing in WSN

Wireless sensor network is an important component of Internet of Things. With the expansion of the network scale, sensor nodes with limited hardware resources and energy supply cannot meet the large-scale transmission and processing of vast amounts of information. Compressive sensing is introduced to improve the energy efficiency of data transmission. In this paper, a mobile data gathering strategy based on adaptive hybrid compressive sensing is proposed. Firstly, the maximum lifetime problem of the network is formulated to the network energy consumption balance problem. Secondly, the mobile actuator path planning problem is converted to a traveling salesman problem optimization problem and a delay based dynamic subnetting is designed. Finally, simulation results evaluate the energy efficiency of our proposed strategy.
The role of control information in wireless link scheduling

In wireless networks, transmissions must be scheduled to opportunistically exploit the time-varying capacity of the wireless channels to achieve maximum throughput. These opportunistic policies require global knowledge of the current network state to schedule transmissions efficiently; however, providing a controller with complete channel state information (CSI) requires significant bandwidth. In this thesis, we investigate the impact of control information on the ability to effectively schedule transmissions. In particular, we study the tradeoff between the availability and accuracy of CSI at the scheduler and the attainable throughput. Moreover, we investigate strategies for controlling the network with limited CSI. In the first half of the thesis, we consider a multi-channel communication system in which the transmitter chooses one of M channels over which to transmit. We model the channel state using an ON/OFF Markov process. First, we consider channel probing policies, in which the transmitter probes a channel to learn its state, and uses the CSI obtained from channel probes to make a scheduling decision. We investigate the optimal channel probing strategies and characterize the tradeoff between probing frequency and throughput. Furthermore, we characterize a fundamental limit on the rate at which CSI must be conveyed to the transmitter in order to meet a constraint on expected throughput. In particular, we develop a novel formulation of the opportunistic scheduling problem as a causal rate distortion optimization of a Markov source. The second half of this thesis considers scheduling policies under delayed CSI, resulting from the transmission and propagation delays inherent in conveying CSI across the network. By accounting for these delays as they relate to the network topology, we revisit the comparison between centralized and distributed scheduling, showing that there exist conditions under which distributed scheduling outperforms the optimal centralized policy. Additionally, we illustrate that the location of a centralized controller impacts the achievable throughput. We propose a dynamic controller placement framework, in which the controller is repositioned using delayed queue length information (QLI). We characterize the throughput region under all such policies, and propose a throughput-optimal joint controller placement and scheduling policy using 3 delayed CSI and QLI. Thesis Supervisor: Eytan H. Modiano Title: Professor
Actions of galanin and some of its analogues on rat isolated gastric fundus *

Summary— The study was undertaken to characterize the effects of porcine galanin (pGal) and some of its analogues on rat gastric fundus muscle strips. pGal, galantide (M15) and pGal(1–14)‐[Abu8]SCY‐I evoked reproducible concentration‐dependent contractions in concentrations of 1–300, 3–1,000 and 100–3,000 nM, respectively, with EC50 values of 13, 70 and 187 nM. Hill's coefficient for pGal is 1.03, indicating an interaction of one pGal molecule with one receptor, fulfilling criteria of classical receptor theory. For M15 and pGal(1–14)‐[Abu8]SCY‐I, Hill's coefficients are significantly different from 1, namely 0.73 and 1.56, so that one drug molecule may not interact with one receptor. The stimulatory effects of pGal were not modified by dibenamine 10 μM or glybenclamide 1 or 10 μM. Diltiazem 0.1, 1 and 10 μM, papaverine 0.1, 10 μM or dibutyryl cAMP (dib cAMP) 100 and 300 μM, blocked the contraction to pGal in a concentration‐dependent manner, indicating an important role for the influx of extracellular calcium ions and regulation by cAMP the pGal‐evoked contraction. Diltiazem, dibutyryl cAMP and papaverine were not competitive antagonists of pGal in the stomach smooth muscle.
Do Pedagogical Agents Facilitate Learner Motivation and Learning Outcomes?

Pedagogical agents – lifelike characters that guide users through multimedia learning environments – are intended to facilitate the learning process. According to social agency theory, the presentation of social cues (the image and voice of the agent) may prime the social interaction schema and cause the learner to deeply process the learning material. Research on pedagogical agents focuses mainly on either the role of the presence of pedagogical agents, by comparing agent and no-agent groups, or on the design of the character, by comparing different agent groups. This article takes a comprehensive view combining both approaches in order to answer the question of how pedagogical agents should be designed so as to promote learner motivation and learning. It is argued that not only the mere presence, but also the valence of the social cues presented plays a decisive role. Two experiments examine the role of the perceived appeal of a pedagogical agent’s appearance and voice. The results of Experiment 1 indic.
A response-based method for analyzing data from Taguchi experiments

The engineering ideas of the Taguchi method have been widely recognized but the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N ratio) has drawn much criticism. Response surface methods do not use S/N ratios but it is not easy to build an adequate response surface model. In this paper, we propose a relatively simple method for analyzing the data from Taguchi experiments. The proposed approach directly uses the average and standard deviation of responses as performance measures. We combine the two measures into the square deviation from target and the optimal factor level is identified as the one that has the smallest deviation from target. We also introduce the concept of relative target, with which the proposed approach is applicable for all three kinds of quality characteristics without a need to execute data transformation. Two real-world examples are included to illustrate the appropriateness of the proposed approach.