Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between CD209 -336A/G and -871A/G Polymorphisms and Susceptibility of Tuberculosis: A Meta-Analysis

Background The association between CD209 promoter polymorphisms (-336A/G, -871A/G) and tuberculosis (TB) risk has been widely reported, but results of previous studies remain controversial and ambiguous. To assess the association between CD209 polymorphisms and TB risk, a meta-analysis was performed. Methods Based on comprehensive searches of the PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Weipu, and CBM databases, we identified outcome data from all articles estimating the association between CD209 polymorphisms and TB risk. The pooled odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. Results A total of 14 studies with 3,610 cases and 3,539 controls were identified. There was no significant association between CD209 -336A/G polymorphism and TB risk (OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 0.91–1.19 for G vs. A; OR = 1.13, 95% CI = 0.84–1.53 for GG vs. AA; OR = 1.04, 95% CI = 0.87–1.24 for GG+AG vs. AA; OR = 1.11, 95% CI = 0.88–1.39 for GG vs. AG+AA). However, the significant association was revealed for Asians in GG vs. AA (OR = 2.48, 95% CI = 1.46–4.22, P = 0.0008) and GG vs. AG+AA (OR = 2.10, 95% CI = 1.33–3.32, P = 0.001). For the CD209 -871A/G polymorphism, lack of an association was also found (OR = 0.81, 95% CI = 0.70–0.95 for G vs. A; OR = 1.00, 95% CI = 0.52–1.93 for GG vs. AA; OR = 0.73, 95% CI = 0.60–0.89 for GG+AG vs. AA; OR = 1.09, 95% CI = 0.57–2.10 for GG vs. AG+AA). Conclusion The present meta-analysis suggested that CD209 promoter polymorphisms (-336A/G, -871A/G) were unlikely to substantially contribute to TB susceptibility. However, the GG genotype of CD209 -336A/G polymorphism might be a genetic risk factor that increases TB susceptibility for Asians in GG vs. AA and GG vs. AG+AA.
Adverse Effects of Conventional Thrice-Weekly Hemodialysis: Is It Time to Avoid 3-Day Interdialytic Intervals?

Background: Maintenance hemodialysis is typically scheduled thrice weekly due to simple logistic reasons; thus, the vast majority of hemodialysis patients receive renal replacement therapy for two shorter 2-day intervals and a longer 3-day interval. As compared to the 2-day interval, we review the ill effects of the longer 3-day interdialytic interval in this report. Summary: Large-scale observational studies show that both cardiovascular-related hospital admissions and mortality occur more frequently on the day following the long interdialytic interval than on any other day of the week. Although the reasons for excess mortality are obscure, several pathophysiologic mechanisms may be involved, such as a greater magnitude of change during the long interdialytic interval in the following parameters: volume status, electrolyte and acid-base status, arterial wall and left ventricle mechanics. These data raise the need for re-examining the issue of timing and frequency of prescribed dialysis regimens in an attempt to improve patient outcomes. Although enhanced-frequency and/or extended-time dialysis schedules may mitigate the risks of the long interdialytic interval, the benefit of such dialytic modalities on survival is not yet proven. Key Message: This article summarizes currently available epidemiologic and pathophysiologic evidence on the adverse effects related to the long interdialytic interval of thrice-weekly hemodialysis and discusses the need to research further alternative dialysis practices that could mitigate these risks.
The Organization Of Internet Web Pages Using Wordnet

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my thesis adviser, Dr. Diane Cook, for her support and guidance. Dr. Cook consistently provided positive feedback and helped me to stay on track. With the Internet increasing in size at a rapid rate, locating information is becoming more difficult. Many people use traditional search engines, such as Altavista, to locate information, but they find that these search engines return links to many irrelevant sites. Alternative search engines which effectively organize web sites perform this task through human intervention. As the Internet grows in size, this manual organization process will become increasingly more difficult to perform. The approach that we have taken is to use machine learning techniques to automate the organization of web pages. Self-organizing maps have been used previously to organize web pages represented as vectors. We believe that by using WordNet, an electronic lexicon, we can take advantage of the relationships that exist between words to improve the vector representations of the web pages, thereby improving the organizational process performed by the self-organizing map.
Impaired Synaptic Vesicle Release and Immaturity of Neuromuscular Junctions in Spinal Muscular Atrophy Mice

The motor neuron disease spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) causes profound muscle weakness that most often leads to early death. At autopsy, SMA is characterized by loss of motor neurons and muscle atrophy, but the initial cellular events that precipitate motor unit dysfunction and loss remain poorly characterized. Here, we examined the function and corresponding structure of neuromuscular junction (NMJ) synapses in a mouse model of severe SMA (hSMN2/delta7SMN/mSmn−/−). Surprisingly, most SMA NMJs remained innervated even late in the disease course; however they showed abnormal synaptic transmission. There was a two-fold reduction in the amplitudes of the evoked endplate currents (EPCs), but normal spontaneous miniature EPC (MEPC) amplitudes. These features in combination indicate reduced quantal content. SMA NMJs also demonstrated increased facilitation suggesting a reduced probability of vesicle release. By electron microscopy, we found a decreased density of synaptic vesicles that is likely to contribute to the reduced release probability. In addition to presynaptic defects, there were postsynaptic abnormalities. EPC and MEPC decay time constants were prolonged because of a slowed switch from the fetal acetylcholine receptor (AChR) γ-subunit to the adult ε-subunit. There was also reduced size of AChR clusters and small myofibers, which expressed an immature pattern of myosin heavy chains. Together these results indicate that impaired synaptic vesicle release at NMJs in severe SMA is likely to contribute to failed postnatal maturation of motor units and muscle weakness.
A Computational Model of the Trait Impressions of the Face for Agent Perception and Face Synthesis

This paper reports a first attempt at developing a computational model of the trait impressions of the face for embodied agents that accommodates the social perception and social construction of faces. Holistic face classifiers, based on principle component analysis (PCA), were trained to match the human classification of faces along the bipolar rating extremes of the following trait dimensions: adjustment, dominance, warmth, sociality, and trustworthiness. Although results were marginally better than chance in matching the perception of dominance (64%), classification rates were significantly better than chance for adjustment (71%), sociality (70%), trustworthiness (81%) and warmth (89%). A second exploratory study demonstrates how PCA models of trait classes could be used by agents to generate faces. Novel faces were synthesized by probing specific PCA trait attribution spaces. Human subjects were then asked to rate the synthesized faces along a number of trait dimensions, and it was found that the synthesized faces succeeded in eliciting predicted trait evaluations.
A General Equilibrium Analysis of Climate Change Impacts on Tourism

This paper studies the economic implications of climate-change-induced variations in tourism demand, using a world CGE model. The model is first re-calibrated at some future years, obtaining hypothetical benchmark equilibria, which are subsequently perturbed by shocks, simulating the effects of climate change. We portray the impact of climate change on tourism by means of two sets of shocks, occurring simultaneously. The first shocks translate predicted variations in tourist flows into changes of consumption preferences for domestically produced goods. The second shocks reallocate income across world regions, simulating the effect of higher or lower tourists’ expenditure. Our analysis highlights that variations in tourist flows will affect regional economies in a way that is directly related to the sign and magnitude of flow variations. At a global scale, climate change will ultimately lead to a welfare loss, unevenly spread across regions.
The relative frequencies of nouns , pronouns , and verbs cross-linguistically Applicant :

1 Volkswagenstiftung Förderinitiative Documentation of Endangered Languages – Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen (DoBeS) 3 Summary This project will investigate the relative frequencies of core parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, and pronouns, in spoken language corpora of seven languages that represent a wide range of areal and typological diversity. We focus on two research questions: (1) Why do languages vary so drastically in the relative frequencies of noun, pronoun, and verb tokens employed in discourse? Our pilot study for this project suggests that in some languages (such as Chintang) the overall number of nouns and pronouns taken together roughly equals the overall number of verbs, while in others (such as Sri Lanka Malay) this ratio is twice as high, i.e., the overall number of nouns and pronouns taken together is roughly double the overall number of verbs. What typological or other differences between languages can explain these differences in the use of parts of speech? One of the hypotheses we will test is the presence of argument indexing on verbs, which may make the overt realization of arguments as nouns or pronouns unnecessary, and may thus explain the low frequencies of nouns and pronouns in some languages. (2) Why do the relative frequencies of nouns, pronouns, and verbs vary within texts? Our pilot study has shown that—consistently across languages—at the beginning of narrative texts, nouns are particularly frequently used, reflecting the introduction of new discourse participants, as expected. Furthermore, there are characteristic, sinusoidal alternations in the frequencies of noun use as narrative texts unfold, with regular peaks of heavy noun use roughly every 10-15 clauses. These peaks may reflect universal cognitive constraints on the activation of discourse participants, which necessitate their re-introduction by full lexical nouns after their activation has decayed, ultimately due to constraints of short-term memory. We will also investigate the influence of further factors on the relative frequencies of nouns, pronouns, and verbs, such as the degree of speakers' and listeners' mutual acquaintance (known/familiar vs. unknown) and text genres. In this context we will empirically test the assumed universality of 'nouniness' of formal genres. The newly available data compiled in the DoBeS framework allow us to develop and then appropriately address these new and exciting research questions for the first time, as they require data from diverse languages that are annotated for parts of speech by experts, time-aligned, and described with detailed metadata with respect to speakers' …
The use of category and exemplar knowledge in the solution of anchoring tasks.

Five studies examine the role that category and exemplar knowledge play in the mediation of anchoring effects--the assimilation of an absolute estimate to a previously considered standard. Studies 1 through 3 demonstrate that comparing the target object with a plausible anchor (i.e., a standard that constitutes a possible value for the target) leads to a selective increase in the accessibility of anchor-consistent exemplar knowledge about the target. This easily accessible knowledge is then used to generate the absolute estimate, which leads to its assimilation to the standard. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrate that comparing the target with an implausible anchor, however, involves the activation of knowledge about the general category of the target, rather than exemplar knowledge about the target itself.
Towards the Albertson Conjecture

Albertson conjectured that if a graph $G$ has chromatic number $r$, then the crossing number of $G$ is at least as large as the crossing number of $K_r$, the complete graph on $r$ vertices. Albertson, Cranston, and Fox verified the conjecture for $r\le 12$. In this paper we prove it for $r\le 16$.
Task centric memory management for an on-chip multiprocessor

In this dissertation we propose a cache memory management method for embedded chip multiprocessors executing multimedia applications with softreal time constraints. We consider a CAKE multiprocessor platform with 4 TriMedia cores and an on-chip memory hierarchy including a shared level two (L2) cache; we assume a multimedia workload. The interference of concurrent accesses to the shared L2 is typically unpredictable. Hence the system has to be compositional to offer real-time guarantees, i.e. the performance of each individual sequential task must be preserved when different tasks execute in parallel or when tasks are added. To ensure compositional cache access we propose to exclusively allocate L2 parts to each task. We compare set and associativity based L2 partitioning for applications with independent tasks and find that both induce compositionality to a large extent: the number of inter-task L2 interference misses is within 1% of the application’s number of misses. However, the former increases, and the latter decreases the system performance. Thus, we propose set-based partitioning as the foundation for the task centric cache management. For applications with dependent tasks, we introduce a mixed partitioning that allocates cache set-based to each task and each shared data/code region, and associativity-based inside a shared data/code region, for each task accessing it. Subsequently, we propose two methods for partitioning ratio optimization, one to minimize the number of misses and one to maximize the throughput. Experiments indicate that mixed partitioning ensures less than 1% inter-task L2 interference, (i.e. high compositionality) and improves performance. Finally, for multiple execution scenarios when the application tasks may start or stop we propose a dynamic cache repartitioning method that: (1) at design-time finds the cache place of each task in every scenario, such that critical tasks are undisturbed, and the repartitioning overhead is minimized, and (2) at run-time switches among partitions and further decreases the repartitioning penalty. Experiments show that this method induces high compositionality, safeguards critical tasks, and increases performance. The results obtained indicate that task centric cache management is a promising approach for embedded multiprocessor systems executing static or dynamic multimedia applications.
BFGS‐like updates of constraint preconditioners for sequences of KKT linear systems in quadratic programming

We focus on efficient preconditioning techniques for sequences of Karush‐Kuhn‐Tucker (KKT) linear systems arising from the interior point (IP) solution of large convex quadratic programming problems. Constraint preconditioners (CPs), although very effective in accelerating Krylov methods in the solution of KKT systems, have a very high computational cost in some instances, because their factorization may be the most time‐consuming task at each IP iteration. We overcome this problem by computing the CP from scratch only at selected IP iterations and by updating the last computed CP at the remaining iterations, via suitable low‐rank modifications based on a BFGS‐like formula. This work extends the limited‐memory preconditioners (LMPs) for symmetric positive definite matrices proposed by Gratton, Sartenaer and Tshimanga in 2011, by exploiting specific features of KKT systems and CPs. We prove that the updated preconditioners still belong to the class of exact CPs, thus allowing the use of the conjugate gradient method. Furthermore, they have the property of increasing the number of unit eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix as compared with the generally used CPs. Numerical experiments are reported, which show the effectiveness of our updating technique when the cost for the factorization of the CP is high.
Origin and Interpretation of Kilohertz Quasi-periodic Oscillations from Strange Stars in an X-Ray Binary System: Theoretical Hydrodynamical Description

We model and interpret kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) from the hydrodynamical description of an accretion disk around a rapidly rotating compact strange star. The higher QPO frequency is described by the viscous effects of an accretion disk leading to shocks, while the lower one is taken to be the Keplerian motion of the accreting matter. Comparing our results with the observations for two of the fastest rotating compact stellar candidates, namely, 4U 1636-53 and KS 1731-260, we find that they match to a very good approximation and thus interpret them as strange stars.
Wolbachia Stimulates Immune Gene Expression and Inhibits Plasmodium Development in Anopheles gambiae

The over-replicating wMelPop strain of the endosymbiont Wolbachia pipientis has recently been shown to be capable of inducing immune upregulation and inhibition of pathogen transmission in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In order to examine whether comparable effects would be seen in the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae, transient somatic infections of wMelPop were created by intrathoracic inoculation. Upregulation of six selected immune genes was observed compared to controls, at least two of which (LRIM1 and TEP1) influence the development of malaria parasites. A stably infected An. gambiae cell line also showed increased expression of malaria-related immune genes. Highly significant reductions in Plasmodium infection intensity were observed in the wMelPop-infected cohort, and using gene knockdown, evidence for the role of TEP1 in this phenotype was obtained. Comparing the levels of upregulation in somatic and stably inherited wMelPop infections in Ae. aegypti revealed that levels of upregulation were lower in the somatic infections than in the stably transinfected line; inhibition of development of Brugia filarial nematodes was nevertheless observed in the somatic wMelPop infected females. Thus we consider that the effects observed in An. gambiae are also likely to be more pronounced if stably inherited wMelPop transinfections can be created, and that somatic infections of Wolbachia provide a useful model for examining effects on pathogen development or dissemination. The data are discussed with respect to the comparative effects on malaria vectorial capacity of life shortening and direct inhibition of Plasmodium development that can be produced by Wolbachia.
Intercellular Calcium Signaling via Gap Junction in Connexin-43-transfected Cells*

In excitable cells, intracellular Ca2+ is released via the ryanodine receptor from the intracellular Ca2+ storing structure, the sarcoplasmic reticulum. To determine whether this released Ca2+propagates through gap junctions to neighboring cells and thereby constitutes a long range signaling network, we developed a cell system in which cells expressing both connexin-43 and ryanodine receptor are surrounded by cells expressing only connexin-43. When the ryanodine receptor in cells was activated by caffeine, propagation of Ca2+ from these caffeine-responsive cells to neighboring cells was observed with a Ca2+ imaging system using fura-2/AM. Inhibitors of gap junctional communication rapidly and reversibly abolished this propagation of Ca2+. Together with the electrophysiological analysis of transfected cells, the observed intercellular Ca2+ wave was revealed to be due to the reconstituted gap junction of transfected cells. We next evaluated the functional roles of cysteine residues in the extracellular loops of connexin-43 in gap junctional communication. Mutations of Cys54, Cys187, Cys192, and Cys198 to Ser showed the failure of Ca2+propagation to neighboring cells in accordance with the electrical uncoupling between transfected cells, whereas mutations of Cys61 and Cys68 to Ser showed the same pattern as the wild type. [14C]Iodoacetamide labeling of free thiols of cysteine residues in mutant connexin-43s showed that two pairs of intramolecular disulfide bonds are formed between Cys54 and Cys192 and between Cys187and Cys198. These results suggest that intercellular Ca2+ signaling takes place in cultured cells expressing connexin-43, leading to their own synchronization and that the extracellular disulfide bonds of connexin-43 are crucial for this process.
A Role for the Human Amygdala in Recognizing Emotional Arousal From Unpleasant Stimuli

Functional neuroimaging and lesion-based neuropsychological experiments have demonstrated the human amygdala's role in recognition of certain emotions signaled by sensory stimuli, notably, fear and anger in facial expressions. We examined recognition of two emotional dimensions, arousal and valence, in a rare subject with complete, bilateral damage restricted to the amygdala. Recognition of emotional arousal was impaired for facial expressions, words, and sentences that depicted unpleasant emotions, especially in regard to fear and anger. However, recognition of emotional valence was normal. The findings suggest that the amygdala plays a critical role in knowledge concerning the arousal of negative emotions, a function that may explain the impaired recognition of fear and anger in patients with bilateral amygdala damage, and one that is consistent with the amygdala's role in processing stimuli related to threat and danger.
Americas Conference on Information Systems ( AMCIS ) 1-1-2009 A Case of VoIP Implementation at A Financial Services

Customer service and customer retention are critical to an organization’s success in the service sector. In the Midwest retail office of Anthem Consultants, the old PBX system was incapable of handling customer inquires during the busy tax return season. The inefficient systems exposed the organization to missed and delayed calls, which lead to a considerable number of customer complaints and lost revenue. This paper presents a case for implementing a VoIP PBX system at Anthem Consultants. Several VoIP systems were tested to determine the suitability of VoIP as the replacement telecommunications platform. The new system increases the availability, speed, and reliability of the information provided to customers and at the same time reduces the staff load. The system implementation also fosters an updated IT plan that will help this organization chart its business strategy for future years.
Influence of Personal Characteristics of the Speaker on Phonetic Quality in Perception of Vowels

This study was designed to investigate the effect of speaker's voice quality on perceived phonetic quality in vowels using a perceptual scaling task. 16 subjects scaled sets of vowels produced by six different speakers (three women, three men). Analysis indicated no significant influence of speakers' quality on judgments of similarity of vowels. Results suggest that judgments of similarity were made on the basis of linguistically categorized images.
Scalable Access Controls for Lineage

Lineage stores often contain sensitive information that needs protection from unauthorized access. We build on prior work for security and privacy of lineage information, focusing on complex conditions and scalable administration. We use Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) to express conditions based on many attributes, instead of roles. We then make administration and management more scalable, instead of managing large, monolithic access predicates for each object. To do so, we first support modular traceability and maintainability for separate concerns (e.g. security, legally mandated privacy, organizationally mandated privacy). We then provide constructs to manage authority when multiple administrators must collaborate. We show that these security techniques are needed for easy lineage security administration.