Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Explorer Functional characterisation of human synaptic genes expressed in the Drosophila brain

'Functional characterisation of human synaptic genes expressed in the Drosophila brain' Biology Open, vol General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac. uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. When reviewing your proofs, please keep in mind that the article has been edited to comply with the basic style requirements of the journal. The enclosed eProof is not to be regarded as an opportunity to alter, amend, or revise your paper; it is intended to be for correction purposes only. Please check the FOLLOWING CAREFULLY: 1. Please pay particular attention to the editing of any text highlighted in red. Not all changes are highlighted in red and so the entire proof must be checked thoroughly. 2. Please check the title, affiliation details, abstract and key words, as these can affect the search results for your article online. 3. Please check that authors' names and corresponding e-mail addresses are correct. 4. Please carefully check all figures, legends, tables and equations (as relevant). Supplementary data: If you have submitted supplementary data, please check that a link has been added before the references (this link only becomes active once the issue is published online) and that all supplementary data are cited in the text. IMPORTANT: We do not edit or prepare proofs of supplementary data, so please check that your uploaded supplementary files are correct and complete. If you wish to make any changes to the content or style of your supplementary data, please provide replacement file(s). Cover suggestions: If you have not already but would like to submit a cover suggestion(s) relating to your article, please email it to the editorial office. The images should be 23 cm (width) × 24 cm (height), with a minimum resolution of 150 ppi, and saved as TIFF or JPG at maximum quality, in RGB mode. Cover suggestions should be accompanied by a cover caption describing the image (up to 100 words). …
Treatment patterns and cost-effectiveness of first line treatment of advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer in Medicare patients

Abstract Aim: To assess the cost-effectiveness of first-line pemetrexed/platinum and other commonly administered regimens in a representative US elderly population with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Materials and methods: This study utilized the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) cancer registry linked to Medicare claims records. The study population included all SEER-Medicare patients diagnosed in 2008–2009 with advanced non-squamous NSCLC (stages IIIB–IV) as their only primary cancer and who started chemotherapy within 90 days of diagnosis. The study evaluated the four most commonly observed first-line regimens: paclitaxel/carboplatin, platinum monotherapy, pemetrexed/platinum, and paclitaxel/carboplatin/bevacizumab. Overall survival and total healthcare cost comparisons as well as incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) were calculated for pemetrexed/platinum vs each of the other three. Unstratified analyses and analyses stratified by initial disease stage were conducted. Results: The final study population consisted of 2,461 patients. Greater administrative censorship of pemetrexed recipients at the end of the study period disproportionately reduced the observed mean survival for pemetrexed/platinum recipients. The disease stage-stratified ICER analysis found that the pemetrexed/platinum incurred total Medicare costs of $536,424 and $283,560 per observed additional year of life relative to platinum monotherapy and paclitaxel/carboplatin, respectively. The pemetrexed/platinum vs triplet comparator analysis indicated that pemetrexed/platinum was associated with considerably lower total Medicare costs, with no appreciable survival difference. Limitations: Limitations included differential censorship of the study regimen recipients and differential administration of radiotherapy. Conclusions: Pemetrexed/platinum yielded either improved survival at increased cost or similar survival at reduced cost relative to comparator regimens in the treatment of advanced non-squamous NSCLC. Limitations in the study methodology suggest that the observed pemetrexed survival benefit was likely conservative.
Current Phase II investigational proteasome inhibitors for the treatment of multiple myeloma

Introduction: The introduction and exploration of novel agents has significantly improved patient outcome in the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM). One such compound, bortezomib, was the first proteasome inhibitor (PI) to be approved as a MM therapeutic. The efficacy and safety data provided by bortezomib usage has provided the basis for the development of a second generation of PIs. Areas covered: This review focuses on PIs that are currently under evaluation in Phase II clinical trials for the treatment of MM. Furthermore, the article summarizes the currently understood mechanisms of action and the available clinical data for its use in MM. Expert opinion: Second generation PIs have demonstrated promising activity in patients with advanced-stage myeloma, including those refractory to bortezomib. It should be noted, however, that their efficacy in upfront settings is currently under investigation. Future PI development should include schedule optimization and the investigation of PIs potential synergistic activity with other anti-myeloma agents.
MF59 adjuvant enhances antibody responses of infant baboons immunized with Haemophilus influenzae type b and Neisseria meningitidis group C oligosaccharide-CRM197 conjugate vaccine

The ability of the adjuvant MF59 to enhance the immunogenicity of polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines was investigated in infant baboons. MF59 consists of stable droplets (<250 nm) of the metabolizable oil squalene and two surfactants, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monooleate and sorbitan trioleate, in an oil-in-water emulsion. In humans, MF59 is well tolerated and enhances the immunogenicity of recombinant protein subunit or particle vaccines. Its effect on the immunogenicity of polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines is unknown. Baboons 1 to 4 months of age were immunized intramuscularly with Neisseria meningitidis group C and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) oligosaccharide-CRM197 conjugate vaccines. The lyophilized vaccines were reconstituted with phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), Al(OH)3 (alum), or MF59. Groups of five animals each were given three injections of the respective formulations, with one injection every 4 weeks. Four weeks after each immunization, the MF59 group had up to 7-fold-higher geometric mean anticapsular-antibody titers than the alum group and 5- to 10-fold-higher N. meningitidis group C bactericidal-antibody titers. Twenty-one weeks after the third immunization, the MF59 group still showed 5- to 10-fold-higher anticapsular-antibody titers. The antibody responses of the animals given the vaccines reconstituted with PBS were low at all times measured. Both the MF59 and alum groups, but not the PBS group, showed booster antibody responses to unconjugated Hib and N. meningitidis group C polysaccharides, results consistent with induction of memory B cells. Thus, MF59 may be useful for accelerating and augmenting immunity to polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines in infants.
Decoding emotional valence from electroencephalographic rhythmic activity

We attempt to decode emotional valence from electroencephalographic rhythmic activity in a naturalistic setting. We employ a data-driven method developed in a previous study, Spectral Linear Discriminant Analysis, to discover the relationships between the classification task and independent neuronal sources, optimally utilizing multiple frequency bands. A detailed investigation of the classifier provides insight into the neuronal sources related with emotional valence, and the individual differences of the subjects in processing emotions. Our findings show: (1) sources whose locations are similar across subjects are consistently involved in emotional responses, with the involvement of parietal sources being especially significant, and (2) even though the locations of the involved neuronal sources are consistent, subjects can display highly varying degrees of valence-related EEG activity in the sources.
Snooping Wikipedia vandals with MapReduce

In this paper, we present and validate an algorithm able to accurately identify anomalous behaviors on online and collaborative social networks, based on their interaction with other fellows. We focus on Wikipedia, where accurate ground truth for the classification of vandals can be reliably gathered by manual inspection of the page edit history. We develop a distributed crawler and classifier tasks, both implemented in MapReduce, with whom we are able to explore a very large dataset, consisting of over 5 millions articles collaboratively edited by 14 millions authors, resulting in over 8 billion pairwise interactions. We represent Wikipedia as a signed network, where positive arcs imply constructive interaction between editors. We then isolate a set of high reputation editors (i.e., nodes having many positive incoming links) and classify the remaining ones based on their interactions with high reputation editors. We demonstrate our approach not only to be practically relevant (due to the size of our dataset), but also feasible (as it requires few MapReduce iteration) and accurate (over 95% true positive rate). At the same time, we are able to classify only about half of the dataset editors (recall of 50%) for which we outline some solution under study.
Missing-feature-theory-based robust simultaneous speech recognition system with non-clean speech acoustic model

A humanoid robot must recognize a target speech signal while people around the robot chat with them in real-world. To recognize the target speech signal, robot has to separate the target speech signal among other speech signals and recognize the separated speech signal. As separated signal includes distortion, automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance degrades. To avoid the degradation, we trained an acoustic model from non-clean speech signals to adapt acoustic feature of distorted signal and adding white noise to separated speech signal before extracting acoustic feature. The issues are (1) To determine optimal noise level to add the training speech signals, and (2) To determine optimal noise level to add the separated signal. In this paper, we investigate how much noises should be added to clean speech data for training and how speech recognition performance improves for different positions of three talkers with soft masking. Experimental results show that the best performance is obtained by adding white noises of 30 dB. The ASR with the acoustic model outperforms with ASR with the clean acoustic model by 4 points.
The contribution of spaceborne SAR interferometry to geomorphological analyses

Interferometric SAR data are used to derive morphometric terrain attributes required by geomorphological and hydrogeological applications. Instead of generating an interferometric Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and subsequently derive the terrain attributes, we compute these quantities directly from the interferogram. Experiments demonstrate that, when compared with traditional DTM-based measures, SAR based attributes seem more stable and offer best performances. Results shown in this paper have been obtained by processing ERS-1/2 SAR data referring to a typical Alpine mountain basin.
Measurement of myocardium at risk with cardiovascular MR: comparison of techniques for edema imaging.

PURPOSE To determine variability and agreement for detecting myocardial edema with T2-weighted short-tau inversion recovery (STIR), acquisition for cardiac unified T2 edema (ACUT2E), T2 mapping, and early gadolinium enhancement (EGE) after successfully reperfused ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and diagnostic accuracy of each sequence to predict infarct-related artery (IRA). MATERIALS AND METHODS Local ethics committee approved the study, with patient informed written consent. On day 2 after successful primary angioplasty for STEMI, 53 patients were prospectively enrolled; 40 patients (mean age, 60 years) completed study. Two sets of cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images were obtained on same day 6 hours apart. Basal, midcavity, and apical sections were obtained with each sequence. Interobserver, intraobserver, and interimage variability (1 minus intraclass correlation coefficient) and agreement (Bland-Altman method) were assessed. RESULTS Size of myocardial edema significantly differed. Mean size of myocardium at risk was similar between T2-weighted STIR (18.2 g) and T2 mapping (17.3 g) (P = .54). Mean size differed between T2-weighted STIR (18.2 g) and ACUT2E (14.0 g) (P = .01) and between T2-weighted STIR (18.2 g) and EGE (14.2 g) (P = .003). T2 mapping and EGE had best agreement (interobserver bias: T2-weighted STIR, -0.9 [mean difference] ± 9.6 [standard deviation]; ACUT2E, -2.5 ± 6.9; T2 mapping, -3.8 ± 4.7; EGE, -5.3 ± 5.9; interimage bias: T2-weighted STIR, 1.5 ± 5.8; ACUT2E, -0.8 ± 4.9; T2 mapping, 3.1 ± 4.0; EGE, 1.1 ± 4.9; intraobserver bias: T2-weighted STIR, 1.4 ± 5.8; ACUT2E, 0.6 ± 4.7; T2 mapping, 2.2 ± 3.1; EGE, 1.7 ± 2.9). Variability was lowest for T2 mapping (intraobserver, 0.05; interobserver, 0.09; interimage, 0.1) followed by EGE (intraobserver, 0.03; interobserver, 0.14; interimage, 0.14), with improved detection of territory of IRA versus ACUT2E (intraobserver, 0.11; interobserver, 0.22; interimage, 0.12) and T2-weighted STIR (intraobserver, 0.1; interobserver, 0.32; interimage, 0.1). CONCLUSION Cardiac MR methods to detect and quantify infarct myocardial edema are not interchangeable; T2 mapping is the most reproducible method, followed by EGE, ACUT2E, and T2-weighted STIR. Clinical trial registration no. NCT01468662
Sampling Heterogeneous Deposits in Gravel-Bed Streams

The methodology of combining subsamples into a single “composite” sample representative of an entire river reach is examined. Current methods of characterizing the overall grain-size distribution of a river reach are inadequate because they either require enormous amounts of material to be collected, are inherently biased, or fail to describe the local variations occurring within the sampled region. These problems can be overcome by employing the grid-by-number sampling technique. Criteria for obtaining an unbiased grid composite sample as well as its overall accuracy are provided. It is proposed that local variations in a river reach’s grainsize distribution can be located by comparing the arithmetic means of adjacent subsamples through the use of statistical hypothesis testing. By systematically comparing the arithmetic means of adjacent subsamples throughout the area of interest and using a moving windows approach to locate sudden changes in a sediment’s grainsize distribution more precisely, the local variability of the river reach can be described adequately.
Stalking Beijing from Timbuktu: A Generic Measurement Approach for Exploiting Location-Based Social Discovery

The rise of smart phone usage has led to an increase in the number of applications that make use of the users' locations. One popular class of such applications is location-based social discovery (LBSD), which enables users to discover others nearby and then communicate. In this paper, we show how LBSD applications can be exploited by even weak adversaries to stalk LBSD users in any city from any location in the world. We develop an automated measurement methodology--combining faking longitude and latitude locations, smart phone emulation, task automation, and optical character recognition (OCR)--that can be adapted to any LBSD service without relying on an application programming interface (API) or on reverse engineering. Although our approach is generic, we focus our study on WeChat, a popular social network. We design a scheme that can determine a discovered user's location to a narrow region. By monitoring mid-town Manhattan for seven days, we gather location information pertaining to 1745 distinct users moving in the targeted geographical region.
A Variational Model for PolSAR Data Speckle Reduction Based on the Wishart Distribution

In this paper, we propose a variational model for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data speckle reduction, which is based on the complex Wishart distribution of the covariance or coherency matrix and multichannel total variation (TV) regularization defined for complex-valued matrices. By assuming the TV regularization to be a prior and taking the statistical distribution of the covariance matrix in each resolution element into account, the variational model for PolSAR covariance data speckle suppression, named WisTV-C, is derived from the maximum a posteriori estimate. A similar variational model for PolSAR coherency data speckle reduction, named WisTV-T, is also obtained. As far as we know, this is the first variational model for the whole PolSAR covariance or coherency matrix data despeckling. Since the model is nonconvex, a convex relaxation iterative algorithm is designed to solve the variational problem, based on the variable splitting and alternating minimization techniques. Experimental results on both simulated and real PolSAR data demonstrate that the proposed approach notably removes speckles in the extended uniform areas and, meanwhile, better preserves the spatial resolution, the details such as edges and point scatterers, and the polarimetric scattering characteristics, compared with other methods.
Moderate seismic activity affects contemporary sediment yields

Current models aiming to simulate contemporary sediment yield (SY) implicitly assume that tectonic effects are either irrelevant or are reflected by catchment topography. In this study we analyse the relation between SY and seismic activity, a component of tectonic processes. Results show a spatial correlation between SY and seismic activity expressed as the estimated peak ground acceleration (PGA) with a 10% exceedance probability in 50 years. PGA has a significant impact on the spatial variation of SY, even after correcting for cross-correlations with topography, lithology or other factors that may influence SY. Based on three distinct data sets, we demonstrate that this effect is significant both for small catchments in Europe (0.3–3940 km2) and for large river systems worldwide (1580–6.15×106 km2) and that seismic activity may be even more important for explaining regional variation in SY than land use or many other commonly considered factors (e.g. catchment area, climate). We show that explicitly considering seismic activity may lead to SY-estimates that easily deviate a factor 2 or more compared to estimates that do not consider seismic activity. This is not only the case for highly seismically active regions: also in regions with a weak to moderate seismic regime seismic activity helps explaining regional patterns in SY. We argue that these findings have important implications for a better understanding of SY and its sensitivity to human impacts, as well as for our comprehension of sediment fluxes at longer timescales.
Vie privée et partage de données personnelles en ligne : une approche typologique

If customers’ data are a source of major value for companies, their collection is confronted with the growing concern of consumers about their privacy, particularly on the Internet. The American literature traditionally identifies three groups. The objective of this research is to propose a typology of the French Net surfers according to the advantages' they seek in exchange of their data. We highlight the existence of four segments that present contrasted profiles on socio-demographic variables as well as on attitudes and behaviors.
When slabs collide: A tectonic assessment of deep earthquakes in the Tonga-Vanuatu region

An unusual group of more than 100 earthquakes is located ∼600 km beneath the North Fiji Basin in the southwest Pacific Ocean. These earthquakes are attributed to seismicity within detached segments of the subducted Australian plate. One of these detached slab segments has collided with, and now impinges on, the subducted Pacific plate at a depth of ∼500 km. The region in the mantle where the two slab segments meet is also characterized by an unparalleled abundance of large-magnitude (Mw >7.0) earthquakes for this depth. The folded shape of the Pacific slab beneath Fiji, as well as the abundance of earthquakes, is interpreted to result from deformation and deformation-enhanced phase transformations as the two slabs collide and settle on the 660 km discontinuity. Detachment of the slab segments is interpreted to have occurred at ca. 5 Ma, but collision between the eastern segment and the west-dipping Pacific slab is interpreted to have occurred at ca. 4 Ma, coincident with initial opening of the overriding Lau Basin.
Committee Report -- Research Needs for the Treatment of Iron and Manganese (PDF)

Iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) problems affect far more water systems than almost any other water quality concern. The research needed to expand the understanding of the science and technology of these metals is discussed. The oxidation-precipitation and adsorption-oxidation techniques for Fe and Mn control were emphasized since they are the most common approaches used by utilities and because of emerging Fe and Mn problems caused by changes in treatment as a result of the trihalomethane regulations. Sequestration was reviewed because of its increasing use, especially by the small water systems which are frequently afflicted by Mn and Fe problems. It is concluded that there is still much to learn about the chemistry, treatment, and control of iron and manganese and that treatment effectiveness should be improved while treatment costs are reduced. 36 refs.