Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nucleus-associated microtubules help determine the division plane of plant epidermal cells: avoidance of four-way junctions and the role of cell geometry

To investigate the spatial relationship between the nucleus and the cortical division site, epidermal cells were selected in which the separation between these two areas is large. Avoiding enzyme treatment and air drying, Datura stramonium cells were labeled with antitubulin antibodies and the three-dimensional aspect of the cytoskeletons was reconstructed using computer-aided optical sectioning. In vacuolated cells preparing for division, the nucleus migrates into the center of the cell, suspended by transvacuolar strands. These strands are now shown to contain continuous bundles of microtubules which bridge the nucleus to the cortex. These nucleus-radiating microtubules adopt different configurations in cells of different shape. In elongated cells with more or less parallel side walls, oblique strands radiating from the nucleus to the long side walls are presumably unstable, for they are progressively realigned into a transverse disc (the phragmosome) as broad, cortical, preprophase bands (PPBs) become tighter. The phragmosome and the PPB are both known predictors of the division plane and our observations indicate that they align simultaneously in elongated epidermal cells. These observations suggest another hypothesis: that the PPB may contain microtubules polymerized from the nuclear surface. In elongated cells, the majority of the radiating microtubules, therefore, come to anchor the nucleus in the transverse plane, consistent with the observed tendency of such cells to divide perpendicular to the long axis. In nonrectangular isodiametric epidermal cells, which approximate regular hexagons in section, the radial microtubular strands emanating from the nucleus tend to remain associated with the middle of each subtending cell wall. The strands are not reorganized into a single dominant transverse bar, but remain as a starlike array until mitosis. PPBs in these cells are not as tight; they may only be a sparse accumulation of microtubules, even forming along non-diametrical radii. This arrangement is consistent with the irregular division patterns observed in epidermal mosaics of isodiametric D. stramonium cells. The various conformations of the radial strands can be modeled by springs held in two-dimensional hexagonal frames, and by soap bubbles in three-dimensional hexagonal frames, suggesting that the division plane may, by analogy, be selected by minimal path criteria. Such behavior offers a cytoplasmic explanation of long-standing empirically derived "rules" which state that the new cell wall tends to meet the maternal wall at right angles. The radial premitotic strands and their analogues avoid taking the longer path to the vertex of an angle where a cross wall is already present between neighboring cells. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Efficient Transfection of Embryonic and Adult Stem Cells

The ability of embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells to differentiate into specific cell types holds immense potential for therapeutic use in cell and gene therapy. Realization of this potential depends on efficient and optimized protocols for genetic manipulation of stem cells. In the study reported here, we demonstrate the use of nucleofection as a method to introduce plasmid DNA into embryonic and adult stem cells with significantly greater efficiency than electroporation or lipid‐based transfection methods have. Using enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) as a reporter gene, mouse embryonic stem cells were transfected both transiently and stably at a rate nearly 10‐fold higher than conventional methods. The transfected cells retained their stem cell properties, including continued expression of the stem cell markers SSEA1, Oct4, and Rex1; formation of embryoid bodies; differentiation into cardiomyocytes in the presence of appropriate inducers; and, when injected into developing blastocysts, contribution to chimeras. Higher levels of transfection were also obtained with human embryonic carcinoma and human embryonic stem cells. Particularly hard‐to‐transfect adult stem cells, including bone marrow and multipotent adult progenitor cells, were also transfected efficiently by the method of nucleofection. Based on our results, we conclude that nucleofection is superior to currently available methods for introducing plasmid DNA into a variety of embryonic and adult stem cells. The high levels of transfection achieved by nucleofection will enable its use as a rapid screening tool to evaluate the effect of ectopically expressed transcription factors on tissue‐specific differentiation of stem cells.
Embodied conversational interface agents

More than another friendly face, Rea knows how to have a conversation with living, breathing human users with a wink, a nod, and a sidelong glance. A nimals and humans all manifest social qualities and skills. Dogs recognize dominance and submission , stand corrected by their superiors, demonstrate consistent personalities, and so forth. On the other hand, only humans communicate through language and carry on conversations with one another. The skills involved in human conversation have developed in such a way as to exploit all the special characteristics of the human body. We make complex repre-sentational gestures with our prehensile hands, gaze away and toward one another out of the corners of our centrally set eyes, and use the pitch and melody of our flexible voices to emphasize and clarify what we are saying. Perhaps because conversation is so defining of humanness and human interaction, the metaphor of face-to-face conversation has been applied to human-computer interface design for quite some time. One of the early arguments for the utility of this metaphor pointed to the application of the features of face-to-face conversation in human-computer interaction, including mixed initiative, nonverbal communication , sense of presence, and the rules involved in transferring control [9]. However, although these features have gained widespread recognition, human-computer conversation has only recently become more than a metaphor. That is, only recently have human-computer interface designers taken the metaphor seriously enough to attempt to design a computer that could hold up its end of the conversation with a human user. Here, I describe some of the features of human-human conversation being implemented in this new genre of embodied conversational agent, exploring a notable embodied conversational agent—named Rea—based on these features. Because conversation is such a primary skill for humans and learned so early in life (practiced, in fact, between infants and their mothers taking turns cooing and burbling EMBODIED CONVERSATIONAL INTERFACE AGENTS
Reducing neural network training data using support vectors

A simple, distributed and sequential procedure has been implemented that include computation of support vectors and use of support vectors data as input to neural networks training. This way we are able to reduce training data to one third and one sixth of original data set after using support vector machines training with radial basis function and polynomial kernels, respectively. The two times training using support vector machines and neural networks do not alter stand of proposed procedure in real life use in view to see one time cost of support vector machines training, reduction in size of original data set for fast training of neural networks and the classification results achieved. This way we are able to select support vector machines and neural networks in machine learning where one technique is support for other technique.
Adaptive Tessellation of NURBS Surfaces

NURBS surfaces are widely used in computer graphics, due to their great accuracy of design and reduced amount of data needed for representation. For real-time visualization, tessellation algorithms are needed, as they make use of the actual graphics hardware through the conversion of surfaces to triangle meshes. The existent algorithms for tessellation are only partially adaptive because the tessellation inside each part of the surface is uniform (non adaptive). We propose an algorithm that generates a mesh of triangles from a NURBS representation of the scene in a fully adaptive way, that is, the resolution is locally selected in such a way that the number of triangles to be processed is minimized without reducing the quality of the nal image.
Rape and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo: a case study of gender-based violence

The just war tradition is based on two principles: jus ad bellum – just war-making, and jus in bello – just war-fighting. Jus in bello contains the non-combatant immunity principle. This ‘protects’ civilians during war, giving them ‘immunity’ from the violence of war-fighting. Women are, for the most part, non-combatants. Still, their experiences during war are far from ‘protected’. Following the widespread use of rape in the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the raping of women in combat and occupation zones is now considered a human rights violation and treated as a crime against humanity. Yet, despite developments in international law and policy-making on sexual violence in armed conflict, the systematic rape of girls and women during armed conflict continues. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this type of gender-based violence is being perpetrated and facilitated at a macro, meso, and micro level. This article will explore these levels through a feminist lens and will consider what is necessary to achieve just post bellum (just peace) in the DRC.
The research about video surveillance platform based on cloud computing

With the rapid development of Smart City, video surveillance platform is a critical part of it now bearing a substantial pressure. The current video surveillance platform appear to have several bottlenecks: overloaded streaming media server, weak tolerant ability and weak in expansion. After an investigation on the architecture of the current stand-alone streaming media server, this paper proposes two new architectures integrated with Hadoop to resolve the aforementioned problems. In the proposed architecture, except the use of Hive and Hbase, streaming media server is designed to be distributed after HDFS, which can also provide streaming data from all of the data nodes. The architecture can completely resolve the problems that a stand-alone streaming media server might not able to deal with.
Entrepreneur training for creativity and innovation

Purpose – This paper's primary purpose is to emphasize the importance of entrepreneur training regarding creativity and innovation. Their significance and the importance of the latter regarding the development of business and training needs are the research questions of a survey conducted in northern Greece.Design/methodology/approach – The survey, of 116 entrepreneurs, owners of small medium and very small enterprises, investigates awareness, attitudes and perceptions regarding creativity and innovation, for facilitating the design and development of training interventions. Data were collected using modified and extended questionnaires of an analogous tool created for the needs of the TRACTORS project. The questionnaires included both open‐ended and closed questions. Descriptive statistics were generated by the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data.Findings – Findings suggest that entrepreneurs/owners and/or managers of micro and small medium enterprises in northern Greece are largely aware of th.
Grip strength and its determinants among older people in different healthcare settings.

BACKGROUND low muscle strength is central to geriatric syndromes including sarcopenia and frailty. It is well described in community-dwelling older people, but the epidemiology of grip strength of older people in rehabilitation or long-term care has been little explored. OBJECTIVE to describe grip strength of older people in rehabilitation and nursing home settings. DESIGN cross-sectional epidemiological study. SETTING three healthcare settings in one town. SUBJECTS hundred and one inpatients on a rehabilitation ward, 47 community rehabilitation referrals and 100 nursing home residents. METHODS grip strength, age, height, weight, body mass index, number of co-morbidities and medications, Barthel score, Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), nutritional status and number of falls in the last year were recorded. RESULTS grip strength differed substantially between healthcare settings for both men and women (P < 0.0001). Nursing home residents had the lowest age-adjusted mean grip strength and community rehabilitation referrals the highest. Broadly higher grip strength was associated in univariate analyses with younger age, greater height and weight, fewer comorbidities, higher Barthel score, higher MMSE score, better nutritional status and fewer falls. However, after mutual adjustment for these factors, the difference in grip strength between settings remained significant. The Barthel score was the characteristic most strongly associated with grip strength. CONCLUSIONS older people in rehabilitation and care home settings had lower grip strength than reported for those living at home. Furthermore grip strength varied widely between healthcare settings independent of known major influences. Further research is required to ascertain whether grip strength may help identify people at risk of adverse health outcomes within these settings.
Analysis of local and wide-field movements in the superior temporal visual areas of the macaque monkey

The middle temporal (MT) and medial superior temporal (MST) areas of the macaque cortex have many cells that respond to straight movements in the frontoparallel plane with directional selectivity (D cells). We examined their responses to movements of a bar, of a wide dot pattern, and to combined movements of the two in anesthetized and immobilized animals. D cells in MT showed a wide variety in the strength of the inhibitory field surrounding the excitatory center field. Responses of SI+-type cells to a bar moving across the excitatory field were suppressed when a wide dot pattern moved over the surround field in the same direction and at the same speed as the bar. Inhibition was selective to the direction and speed of the surround movement, and the effective area for inhibition occupied a wide area, which expanded in all radial directions. Responses of SI- -type cells to a center bar movement were changed little by a conjoint movement over the surround field. Consequently, SI- -type cells responded to wide-field movement as well as to stimuli confined within the excitatory field. Although D cells in MST commonly had large excitatory fields, a proportion of them (Figure type) responded to bar movement much more strongly than to wide- field movement. Their responses to a bar movement were suppressed direction-selectively by a conjoint movement of a wide dot-pattern background. The effective area for inhibition coexisted with the excitatory field in these cells. MST cells of the Nonselective type responded comparably well to the two stimuli, and those of the Field type responded much more strongly to wide-field movement than to bar movement. It is thus suggested that MT cells of the SI+ type and MST cells of the Figure type can detect a difference between movements of an object and its wide background, whereas MST cells of the Field type can detect a conjoint movement of a wide field, neglecting the movements of a single object.
PRE DIALYSIS PATIENTS; FREQUENCY OF MALNUTRITION IN CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE

Introduction: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an alarmingly increasing condition from day to day andit is assumed that malnutrition is co-existent in patients with chronic renal failure (CRF). Malnutrition also occurs in pre-dialysis patients. Such patients have reduced body weight, depleted fat (energy) stores, loss of somatic protein (low muscle mass) and low levels of different plasma proteins like pre-albumin albumin, transferrin, and others. Objective: To ascertain the frequency of malnutrition in dialysis independent patients of chronic kidney disease. Setting: Department of nephrology, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre Karachi. Duration of study: 6 month from 1 June 2013 – 1 December 2013. Study design: cross sectional study. Subjects and methods: Patients with chronic kidney disease (GFR <60ml/min/1.73m2) on conservative management irrespective of cause and sex were studied. All Patients with CKD stage 3 and onwards i. ecreatinine clearance less than 60ml/ min/1.73m2for more than 6 months were considered. Descriptive analysis of these patients was done by: Calculating mean ± SD for age and duration of disease. Male to female ratio was calculated. Frequency of malnutrition in undialysed patients was calculated. The effect modifier of age, gender, duration of disease was controlled through stratification. Chi square test was applied and p value ≤0.05 was taken as significant. Result: Out of 137 patients, 80 were males and 57 were females and the mean age of patients was 58 ±5.8. Mean duration of disease was 5.2 ±1.05. Moderate malnutrition cases were 58(42.3%) while severe malnutrition was observed in 32(23.35%) cases. Conclusion: Patients of chronic kidney disease were found to be at risk of malnutrition.
Regeneration of axons and synaptic connections by touch sensory neurons in the leech central nervous system

In studies of axonal regeneration, it has been difficult to determine (a) whether growth along the normal pathway is important for restoration of connections with previous targets and (b) whether the new synapses resemble the old in strength and location. To address these problems at the level of individual nerve cells, we have studied touch (T) sensory neurons in the leech after their axons have been severed and we have confirmed that their axons regenerate electrical connections with some of their usual synaptic targets in the central nervous system. Injections of horseradish peroxidase and Lucifer Yellow dye into separate T cells in unoperated animals showed that T cell axons typically run close to one another within single ganglia or from ganglion to ganglion. Knowledge of one T cell's arborizations thus revealed the groundplan of others in the same ganglia and the sites of apparent contact with its synaptic targets. For regenerating axons, those sprouts that encountered the normal pathway (as marked by homologous axons) grew preferentially along it. Despite the striking coincidence of old and new pathways, regenerated branching patterns within the ganglionic neuropils were usually incomplete and sometimes had atypical branches. Synaptic connections with normal targets (other T cells as well as S and C cells) were abnormally weak physiologically. The numbers of apparent contacts seen with the light microscope were also lower than normal. In addition, the strength of the synaptic potentials, normalized to the number of contacts (calculated as microvolts per contact), was generally smaller in the regenerated connections than in the controls, and smallest at earliest times, during the first 6 weeks following injury. It thus appears to be characteristic of T cell regeneration that axon regrowth is aided by the recognition of specific pathways and that successful regeneration, as assayed anatomically and physiologically, occurs frequently but usually incompletely.
DIVERSITY IMPROVEMENT IN RECOMMENDER SYSTEM

Recommender Systems are software tools and techniques for providing suggestions to a user. The suggestions relate to decision-making processes, like what items to buy, what music to listen to, or what online news to read. There are different ways in which recommendations can be made. The success of recommender system depends on the usefulness of the system. The usefulness can be measured in terms of accuracy, diversity, flexibility, serendipity and reliability. Most of the previous works have been focused only on improving recommendation accuracy. One of the important aspects like diversity has been never considered. In this paper several recommendation techniques have been explored. A graph based approach for maximizing diversity and item bundles for increasing capability have been proposed.
Social work and a social model of madness and distress: Developing a viable role for the future

This article explores the social model in relation to 'mental health' policy and practice generally and social work specifi cally. It highlights the continuing dominance of bio-medical approaches to and interpretations of 'mental health'; examines the development and nature of mainstream social approaches and considers mental health service users' own discussions of a social model of madness and distress. The article looks at the ramifi cations for social work which is based on a social model of madness and distress; what it might look like and what infrastructural supports it is likely to require to develop effectively.
Object-Relational Database Representations for Text Indexing

One of the distinctive features of Information Retrieval systems comparing to Database Management systems, is that they offer better compression for posting lists, resulting in better I/O performance and thus faster query evaluation. In this paper, we introduce database representations of the index that reduce the size (and thus the disk I/Os) of the posting lists. This is not achieved by redesigning the DBMS, but by exploiting the non 1NF features that existing Object-Relational DBM systems (ORDBMS) already offer. Specifically, four different database representations are described and detailed experimental results for one million pages are reported. Three of these representations are one order of magnitude more space efficient and faster (in query evaluation) than the plain relational representation.
Mothers with a Mental Illness: Stressors and Resources for Parenting and Living

Policy changes as well as improved treatment and rehabilitation practices mean that more women with mental illness are carrying out parenting roles. However, mental-health services have only given limited attention to parenting problems and benefits for clients with psychiatric disabilities. Previous research has focused more on mothers' clinical characteristics, and less on the social and economic contexts in which parenting occurs. The present report involves a large, primarily minority sample of women with serious mental illness who are mothers and who are being served in the public mental-health system of a large urban area. We sought to collect more comprehensive information to better understand their situations and improve service provisions. The women in the study report experiencing severe financial strains and health problems, even when compared with other low-income, urban-based populations. Many also have experienced crises, loss of significant others, assaults, and other negative life events that are very stressful, along with a high number of chronic hassles. They do have resources available to them, through interpersonal supports, religion, and mental-health services. The discussion focuses on implications for micro- and macro-practice to improve these women's lives, their parenting, and the potential outcomes of their children.