Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulatory Interaction between the Cellular Restriction Factor IFI16 and Viral pp65 (pUL83) Modulates Viral Gene Expression and IFI16 Protein Stability

ABSTRACT A key player in the intrinsic resistance against human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is the interferon-γ-inducible protein 16 (IFI16), which behaves as a viral DNA sensor in the first hours postinfection and as a repressor of viral gene transcription in the later stages. Previous studies on HCMV replication demonstrated that IFI16 binds to the viral protein kinase pUL97, undergoes phosphorylation, and relocalizes to the cytoplasm of infected cells. In this study, we demonstrate that the tegument protein pp65 (pUL83) recruits IFI16 to the promoter of the UL54 gene and downregulates viral replication, as shown by use of the HCMV mutant v65Stop, which lacks pp65 expression. Interestingly, at late time points of HCMV infection, IFI16 is stabilized by its interaction with pp65, which stood in contrast to IFI16 degradation, observed in herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1)-infected cells. Moreover, we found that its translocation to the cytoplasm, in addition to pUL97, strictly depends on pp65, as demonstrated with the HCMV mutant RV-VM1, which expresses a form of pp65 unable to translocate into the cytoplasm. Thus, these data reveal a dual role for pp65: during early infection, it modulates IFI16 activity at the promoter of immediate-early and early genes; subsequently, it delocalizes IFI16 from the nucleus into the cytoplasm, thereby stabilizing and protecting it from degradation. Overall, these data identify a novel activity of the pp65/IFI16 interactome involved in the regulation of UL54 gene expression and IFI16 stability during early and late phases of HCMV replication. IMPORTANCE The DNA sensor IFI16, a member of the PYHIN proteins, restricts HCMV replication by impairing viral DNA synthesis. Using a mutant virus lacking the tegument protein pp65 (v65Stop), we demonstrate that pp65 recruits IFI16 to the early UL54 gene promoter. As a putative counteraction to its restriction activity, pp65 supports the nucleocytoplasmic export of IFI16, which was demonstrated with the viral mutant RV-VM1 expressing a nuclearly retained pp65. These data reveal a dual role of pp65 in IFI16 regulation: in the early phase of HCMV infection, it contributes to viral evasion from IFI16 restriction activity, while at later time points, it promotes the nuclear delocalization of IFI16, thereby stabilizing and protecting it from degradation. In the present work, we further clarify the mechanisms HCMV relies on to overcome intracellular innate immune restriction and provide new insights into the relevance of DNA-sensing restriction factor IFI16 during HCMV infection.
Water Quality Monitoring Protocol for Inland Lakes : Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network

National Park Service, Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network, 2800 Lake Shore Drive East, Ashland, Wisconsin 54806; Center for Water and the Environment, Natural Resources Research Institute, University of Minnesota-Duluth, 5013 Miller Trunk Highway, Duluth, Minnesota 55811; U.S. Department of the Interior. National Park Service, Natural Resource Program Center, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Cities through the Prism of People’s Spending Behavior

Scientific studies of society increasingly rely on digital traces produced by various aspects of human activity. In this paper, we exploit a relatively unexplored source of data–anonymized records of bank card transactions collected in Spain by a big European bank, and propose a new classification scheme of cities based on the economic behavior of their residents. First, we study how individual spending behavior is qualitatively and quantitatively affected by various factors such as customer’s age, gender, and size of his/her home city. We show that, similar to other socioeconomic urban quantities, individual spending activity exhibits a statistically significant superlinear scaling with city size. With respect to the general trends, we quantify the distinctive signature of each city in terms of residents’ spending behavior, independently from the effects of scale and demographic heterogeneity. Based on the comparison of city signatures, we build a novel classification of cities across Spain in three categories. That classification exhibits a substantial stability over different city definitions and connects with a meaningful socioeconomic interpretation. Furthermore, it corresponds with the ability of cities to attract foreign visitors, which is a particularly remarkable finding given that the classification was based exclusively on the behavioral patterns of city residents. This highlights the far-reaching applicability of the presented classification approach and its ability to discover patterns that go beyond the quantities directly involved in it.
Maximizing without difficulty: A modified maximizing scale and its
 correlates

This article presents several studies that replicate and extend previous research on maximizing. A modified scale for measuring individual maximizing tendency is introduced. The scale has adequate psychometric properties and reflects maximizers’ aspirations for high standards and their preference for extensive alternative search, but not the decision difficulty aspect included in several previous studies. Based on this scale, maximizing is positively correlated with optimism, need for cognition, desire for consistency, risk aversion, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy and perceived workload, whereas the association with regret is inconsistent. Analysis of correlates of the difficulty dimension suggests that decision difficulty should be conceptualized as a separate dimension rather than as a sub-dimension of maximizing. Opportunities for future research are suggested.
MOBP levels are regulated by Fyn kinase and affect the morphological differentiation of oligodendrocytes

ABSTRACT Oligodendrocytes are the myelinating glial cells of the central nervous system (CNS). Myelin is formed by extensive wrapping of oligodendroglial processes around axonal segments, which ultimately allows a rapid saltatory conduction of action potentials within the CNS and sustains neuronal health. The non-receptor tyrosine kinase Fyn is an important signaling molecule in oligodendrocytes. It controls the morphological differentiation of oligodendrocytes and is an integrator of axon–glial signaling cascades leading to localized synthesis of myelin basic protein (MBP), which is essential for myelin formation. The abundant myelin-associated oligodendrocytic basic protein (MOBP) resembles MBP in several aspects and has also been reported to be localized as mRNA and translated in the peripheral myelin compartment. The signals initiating local MOBP synthesis are so far unknown and the cellular function of MOBP remains elusive. Here, we show, by several approaches in cultured primary oligodendrocytes, that MOBP synthesis is stimulated by Fyn activity. Moreover, we reveal a new function for MOBP in oligodendroglial morphological differentiation. Summary: In oligodendrocytes, Fyn kinase regulates the synthesis of MOBP, and MOBP is required for establishing the complex cellular morphology of oligodendrocytes.
Combining and Sequencing Adjuvant Chemotherapy and Tamoxifen in Postmenopausal Women with Node-Positive Breast Cancer

Evaluation of: Albain KS, Barlow WE, Ravdin PM et al.; Breast Cancer Intergroup of North America: Adjuvant chemotherapy and timing of tamoxifen in postmenopausal patients with endocrine-responsive, node-positive breast cancer: a Phase 3, open-label, randomised controlled trial. Lancet 374(9707), 2055–2063 (2009). This Phase III trial randomized 1477 postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive, node-positive operable breast cancer to receive 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen alone, or tamoxifen given concurrently or after cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin and fluorouracil (CAF) chemotherapy. After 13 years of follow-up, the 10-year disease-free survival was significantly improved in the group receiving the combination of CAF chemotherapy and tamoxifen, compared with the tamoxifen-alone group (57 vs 48%, respectively; p = 0.002); overall survival was also marginally improved in the combination group (65 vs 60%; p = 0.0057). Sequential tamoxifen given after CAF chemotherapy marginally improved disease-free survival compared with concurrent tamoxifen and chemotherapy (60 vs 53%, respectively; p = 0.057). Chemotherapy with CAF together with sequential tamoxifen is a more effective adjuvant therapy for postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive, node-positive breast cancer compared with tamoxifen alone.
Analyzing the Effects of a G137V Mutation in the FXN Gene

Reduced levels of frataxin, an essential mitochondrial protein involved in the regulation of iron-sulfur cluster biogenesis, are responsible for the recessive neurodegenerative Friedreich Ataxia (FRDA). Expansion of a GAA triplet in the first intron of the FRDA is essential for disease development which causes partial silencing of frataxin. In the vast majority of cases, patients are homozygotes for the expansion, but a small number of FRDA patients are heterozygotes for expansion and point mutations in the frataxin coding frame. In this study, we analyze the effects of a point mutation G137V. The patient P94–2, with a history of alcohol and drug abuse, showed a FRDA onset at the border between the classic and late onset phenotype. We applied a combination of biophysical and biochemical methods to characterize its effects on the structure, folding and activity of frataxin. Our study reveals no impairment of the structure or activity of the protein but a reduced folding stability. We suggest that the mutation causes misfolding of the native chain with consequent reduction of the protein concentration in the patient and discuss the possible mechanism of disease.
Unsupervised learning human's activities by overexpressed recognized non-speech sounds

Human activity and environment produces sounds such as, at home, the noise produced by water, cough, or television. These sounds can be used to determine the activity in the environment. The objective is to monitor a person's activity or determine his environment using a single low cost microphone by sound analysis. The purpose is to adapt programs to the activity or environment or detect abnormal situations. Some patterns of over expressed repeatedly in the sequences of recognized sounds inter and intra environment allow to characterize activities such as the entrance of a person in the house, or a tv program watched. We first manually annotated 1500 sounds of daily life activity of old persons living at home recognized sounds. Then we inferred an ontology and enriched the database of annotation with a crowed sourced manual annotation of 7500 sounds to help with the annotation of the most frequent sounds. Using learning sound algorithms, we defined 50 types of the most frequent sounds. We used this set of recognizable sounds as a base to tag sounds and put tags on them. By using over expressed number of motifs of sequences of the tags, we were able to categorize using only a single low-cost microphone, complex activities of daily life of a persona at home as watching TV, entrance in the apartment of a person, or phone conversation including detecting unknown activities as repeated tasks performed by users.
Visuospatial working memory in learning from multimedia systems

Multimedia systems involve the association of various types of information: verbal information presented visually or auditorily, static or dynamic pictorial information, and sound information. In a cognitive approach, integrating this information involves complex processes constrained by properties of the learner’s cognitive system, and especially by the capacity of working memory. This paper, reports on an experiment focused on the integration of verbal and pictorial information when students learn a series of physics concepts. The involvement of the visuospatial working memory was investigated by means of a dual-task paradigm. Results show that pictorial information enhances the learning process. They also suggest that the visual and the spatial components of visuospatial working memory should be considered separately. Finally, they emphasise the need to consider the limitations in cognitive resources available to the learner.
A microeconomic data mining problem: customer-oriented catalog segmentation

The microeconomic framework for data mining [7] assumes that an enterprise chooses a decision maximizing the overall utility over all customers where the contribution of a customer is a function of the data available on that customer. In Catalog Segmentation, the enterprise wants to design k product catalogs of size r that maximize the overall number of catalog products purchased. However, there are many applications where a customer, once attracted to an enterprise, would purchase more products beyond the ones contained in the catalog. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate an alternative problem formulation, that we call Customer-Oriented Catalog Segmentation, where the overall utility is measured by the number of customers that have at least a specified minimum interest t in the catalogs. We formally introduce the Customer-Oriented Catalog Segmentation problem and discuss its complexity. Then we investigate two different paradigms to design efficient, approximate algorithms for the Customer-Oriented Catalog Segmentation problem, greedy (deterministic) and randomized algorithms. Since greedy algorithms may be trapped in a local optimum and randomized algorithms crucially depend on a reasonable initial solution, we explore a combination of these two paradigms. Our experimental evaluation on synthetic and real data demonstrates that the new algorithms yield catalogs of significantly higher utility compared to classical Catalog Segmentation algorithms.
Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion Using A-Buffer Techniques

Computing ambient occlusion in screen-space (SSAO) is a common technique in real-time rendering applications which use rasterization to process 3D triangle data. However, one of the most critical problems emerging in screen-space is the lack of information regarding occluded geometry which does not pass the depth test and is therefore not resident in the G-buffer. These occluded fragments may have an impact on the proximity-based shadowing outcome of the ambient occlusion pass. This not only decreases image quality but also prevents the application of SSAO on multiple layers of transparent surfaces where the shadow contribution depends on opacity. We propose a novel approach to the SSAO concept by taking advantage of per-pixel fragment lists to store multiple geometric layers of the scene in the G-buffer, thus allowing order independent transparency (OIT) in combination with high quality, opacity-based ambient occlusion (OITAO). This A-buffer concept is also used to enhance overall ambient occlusion quality by providing stable results for low-frequency details in dynamic scenes. Furthermore, a flexible compression-based optimization strategy is introduced to improve performance while maintaining high quality results.
Sparse Recovery with Brownian Sensing

We consider the problem of recovering the parameter α ∈ ℝK of a sparse function f (i.e. the number of non-zero entries of α is small compared to the number K of features) given noisy evaluations of f at a set of well-chosen sampling points. We introduce an additional randomization process, called Brownian sensing, based on the computation of stochastic integrals, which produces a Gaussian sensing matrix, for which good recovery properties are proven, independently on the number of sampling points N, even when the features are arbitrarily non-orthogonal. Under the assumption that f is Holder continuous with exponent at least 1/2, we provide an estimate ᾶ of the parameter such that ∥α - ᾶ∥2 = O(∥η∥2/√N), where η is the observation noise. The method uses a set of sampling points uniformly distributed along a one-dimensional curve selected according to the features. We report numerical experiments illustrating our method.
Exploiting H~~ Sampled-Data Control Theory for High-Precision Electromechanical Servo Control Design

Optimal design of digital controllers for industrial electromechanical servo systems using an Hinfin-criterion is considered. Present industrial practice is to perform the control design in the continuous time domain and to discretize the controller a posteriori. This procedure involves unnecessary approximations. Alternatively, a direct sampled-data control design can be made, where an optimal discrete time controller is computed for a continuous time standard plant. Though theoretically and numerically solvable, a sampled-data approach is hardly feasible in an industrial environment. In this paper, a discrete time control design approach is taken. Tools that stem from sampled-data control and multirate systems theory are presented to evaluate the intersample behavior in the frequency domain, since intersample behavior is not explicitly addressed during discrete time control design. Experimental results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed discrete time control design approach and to illustrate the importance of intersample behavior in practical applications
On the Search for Transits of the Planets Orbiting Gliese 876

We report the results of a globally coordinated photometric campaign to search for transits by the P ~ 30 day and P ~ 60 day outer planets of the three-planet system orbiting the nearby M dwarf Gl 876. These two planets experience strong mutual perturbations, which necessitate the use of a dynamical (four-body) model to compute transit ephemerides for the system. Our photometric data have been collected from published archival sources, as well as from our photometric campaigns that were targeted to specific transit predictions. Our analysis indicates that transits by planet c (P ~ 30 days) do not currently occur, in concordance with the best-fit i = 50° coplanar configuration obtained by dynamical fits to the most recent radial velocity data for the system. Transits by planet b (P ~ 60 day) are not entirely ruled out by our observations, but our data indicate that it is very unlikely that they occur. Our experience with the Gl 876 system suggests that a distributed ground-based network of small telescopes can be used to search for transits of very low mass M stars by terrestrial-sized planets.
Population-Based Analysis of 4113 Patients With Acute Cholecystitis: Defining the Optimal Time-Point for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Objective:To compare clinical outcomes after laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) for acute cholecystitis performed at various time-points after hospital admission. Background:Symptomatic gallstones represent an important public health problem with LC the treatment of choice. LC is increasingly offered for acute cholecystitis, however, the optimal time-point for LC in this setting remains a matter of debate. Methods:Analysis was based on the prospective database of the Swiss Association of Laparoscopic and Thoracoscopic Surgery and included patients undergoing emergency LC for acute cholecystitis between 1995 and 2006, grouped according to the time-points of LC since hospital admission (admission day (d0), d1, d2, d3, d4/5, d ≥6). Linear and generalized linear regression models assessed the effect of timing of LC on intra- or postoperative complications, conversion and reoperation rates and length of postoperative hospital stay. Results:Of 4113 patients, 52.8% were female, median age was 59.8 years. Delaying LC resulted in significantly higher conversion rates (from 11.9% at d0 to 27.9% at d ≥6 days after admission, P < 0.001), surgical postoperative complications (5.7% to 13%, P < 0.001) and re-operation rates (0.9% to 3%, P = 0.007), with a significantly longer postoperative hospital stay (P < 0.001). Conclusions:Delaying LC for acute cholecystitis has no advantages, resulting in significantly increased conversion/re-operation rate, postoperative complications and longer postoperative hospital stay. This investigation—one of the largest in the literature—provides compelling evidence that acute cholecystitis merits surgery within 48 hours of hospital admission if impact on the patient and health care system is to be minimized.
Classification, recherche et composition de services Web

The Web services’ standards have some limits: UDDI provides a simple classification of Web services by sectors and WSDL doesn’t provide any Web services topologies’ description. Since these limits can influence Web services research’s results’ quality, this work aims to propose an approach that permits an optimised classification and a pertinent research of Web services. For that, we made some additions to SOAP, WSDL et UDDI in order to ensure the Web services invocation’s traceability, to deduce the meta data relative to Web services’ use, to enrich the Web services’ description with intensional data describing Web services’ topologies, to generate Web services cognitive “ maps” and to propose a method of clustering Web services based on symbolic data which contributes in reducing the research and the composition space and optimises these operations. MOTS-CLES : Services Web, composition, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, tracabilite, meta-donnees donnees intentionnelles, topologie, clusterisation, recherche, donnees symboliques, .
A Texture Analysis Approach for Characterizing Microcalcifications on Mammograms

The current study investigates whether texture properties of the tissue surrounding microcalcification (MC) clusters can contribute to breast cancer diagnosis. The case sample analyzed consists of 100 mammographic images, originating from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). All mammograms selected correspond to heterogeneously and extremely dense breast parenchyma and contain subtle MC clusters (46 benign and 54 malignant, according to database ground truth tables). Regions of interest (ROIs) of 128x128 pixels, containing the MCs are used for the subsequent texture analysis. ROIs are preprocessed using a wavelet-based locally adapted contrast enhancement method and a thresholding technique is applied to exclude MCs. Texture features are extracted from the remaining ROI area (surrounding tissue) employing first and second order statistics algorithms, grey level run length matrices and Laws’ texture energy measures. Differentiation between malignant and benign MCs is performed using a knearest neighbour (kNN) classifier and employing the leaveone-out training-testing methodology. The Laws’ texture energy measures demonstrated the highest performance achieving an overall accuracy of 89%, sensitivity 90.74% (49 of 54 malignant cases classified correctly) and specificity 86.96% (40 of the 46 benign cases classified correctly). Texture analysis of the tissue surrounding MCs shows promising results in computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer and may contribute to the reduction of benign biopsies.