Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simultaneous Disruption of Mouse ASIC1a, ASIC2 and ASIC3 Genes Enhances Cutaneous Mechanosensitivity

Three observations have suggested that acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) might be mammalian cutaneous mechanoreceptors; they are structurally related to Caenorhabditis elegans mechanoreceptors, they are localized in specialized cutaneous mechanosensory structures, and mechanical displacement generates an ASIC-dependent depolarization in some neurons. However, previous studies of mice bearing a single disrupted ASIC gene showed only subtle or no alterations in cutaneous mechanosensitivity. Because functional redundancy of ASIC subunits might explain limited phenotypic alterations, we hypothesized that disrupting multiple ASIC genes would markedly impair cutaneous mechanosensation. We found the opposite. In behavioral studies, mice with simultaneous disruptions of ASIC1a, -2 and -3 genes (triple-knockouts, TKOs) showed increased paw withdrawal frequencies when mechanically stimulated with von Frey filaments. Moreover, in single-fiber nerve recordings of cutaneous afferents, mechanical stimulation generated enhanced activity in A-mechanonociceptors of ASIC TKOs compared to wild-type mice. Responses of all other fiber types did not differ between the two genotypes. These data indicate that ASIC subunits influence cutaneous mechanosensitivity. However, it is unlikely that ASICs directly transduce mechanical stimuli. We speculate that physical and/or functional association of ASICs with other components of the mechanosensory transduction apparatus contributes to normal cutaneous mechanosensation.
The Relation of Planum Temporale Asymmetry and Morphology of the Corpus Callosum to Handedness, Gender, and Dyslexia: A Review of the Evidence

Asymmetry of the planum temporale in relation to handedness, gender, and dyslexia is reviewed. The frequency of rightward asymmetry is rather higher than are estimates of the proportion of right hemisphere speech representation in the general population. Conversely, the frequency of leftward asymmetry is lower than the proportion of the population with left hemisphere speech. Neuro-anatomic asymmetry may relate more to handedness than to language lateralization. There are suggestions that neuroanatomic asymmetry is reduced in females compared to males but the data are inconclusive. Reports concerning handedness and gender differences in callosal structure are conflicting but, as with planum asymmetry, any effect of handedness is as likely to relate to degree as to direction of handedness. It has been reported that the plana are more often symmetrical in size or larger on the right side among dyslexics than controls but this has not always been found. However, greater frequency of atypical (a)symmetry of the planum in dyslexia would be consistent with the absence of a factor which, when present, biases the distribution of planum asymmetry toward the left (and handedness towards the right) as hypothesized by Annett (1985). Studies of the size of the corpus callosum in dyslexia have produced conflicting findings.
Novel understanding of ABC transporters ABCB1/MDR/P-glycoprotein, ABCC2/MRP2, and ABCG2/BCRP in colorectal pathophysiology.

AIM To evaluate ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters in colonic pathophysiology as they had recently been related to colorectal cancer (CRC) development. METHODS Literature search was conducted on PubMed using combinations of the following terms: ABC transporters, ATP binding cassette transporter proteins, inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative, colitis, Crohn's disease, colorectal cancer, colitis, intestinal inflammation, intestinal carcinogenesis, ABCB1/P-glycoprotein (P-gp/CD243/MDR1), ABCC2/multidrug resistance protein 2 (MRP2) and ABCG2/breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), Abcb1/Mdr1a, abcc2/Mrp2, abcg2/Bcrp, knock-out mice, tight junction, membrane lipid function. RESULTS Recently, human studies reported that changes in the levels of ABC transporters were early events in the adenoma-carcinoma sequence leading to CRC. A link between ABCB1, high fat diet and gut microbes in relation to colitis was suggested by the animal studies. The finding that colitis was preceded by altered gut bacterial composition suggests that deletion of Abcb1 leads to fundamental changes of host-microbiota interaction. Also, high fat diet increases the frequency and severity of colitis in specific pathogen-free Abcb1 KO mice. The Abcb1 KO mice might thus serve as a model in which diet/environmental factors and microbes may be controlled and investigated in relation to intestinal inflammation. Potential molecular mechanisms include defective transport of inflammatory mediators and/or phospholipid translocation from one side to the other of the cell membrane lipid bilayer by ABC transporters affecting inflammatory response and/or function of tight junctions, phagocytosis and vesicle trafficking. Also, diet and microbes give rise to molecules which are potential substrates for the ABC transporters and which may additionally affect ABC transporter function through nuclear receptors and transcriptional regulation. Another critical role of ABCB1 was suggested by the finding that ABCB1 expression identifies a subpopulation of pro-inflammatory Th17 cells which were resistant to treatment with glucocorticoids. The evidence for the involvement of ABCC2 and ABCG2 in colonic pathophysiology was weak. CONCLUSION ABCB1, diet, and gut microbes mutually interact in colonic inflammation, a well-known risk factor for CRC. Further insight may be translated into preventive and treatment strategies.
Shortest-time route finding application using vehicular communication

Since vehicular transportation is the preferred travel mode, people are spending more time on the road due to traffic problems, that are increasing with the growing levels of motorization worldwide. A significant percentage of this time is spent during traffic congestion and at road junctions. With the advances in wireless technologies and the emergence of Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC) techniques, new research studies are carried out to develop new applications and services over vehicular ad hoc networks, for improving the efficiency and safety on the road, with the advantage of bypassing the need for expensive infrastructure. However, despite the considerable research effort that is concentrating on data dissemination and routing protocols, the support for applications other than the access to the internet remains limited. In this paper, we propose a vehicular communication application for providing travelling vehicles with timely information to find the shortest-time route to their destinations according to the road condition. The proposed application employs a Geocasting protocol for information sharing among vehicles within a certain geographic area. We show, through simulation results, that the proposed application can significantly decrease the average travel time under different traffic patterns.
Using the Redundant Residue Number System to increase Routing Dependability on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract— Routing in Ad Hoc Networks is a critical issue. It must deal with the dynamic topology and lack of centralized operations guaranteeing the message delivery. In these networks, data messages might be dropped by malicious nodes, buffer overflows or even due to collisions. A technique to reduce the impact of the data messages discard in ad hoc networks is presented in this paper. This technique combines a Redundant Residue Number System and multipath routing. The Redundant Residue Number System allows a message to be split into n partial parts, and reconstructed using only t > n/2 parts. The proposed mechanism uses the Redundant Residue Number System to split data messages into n parts which are sent to the destination through disjoint routes using a multipath routing protocol. The multipath routing protocol is used to guarantee that the n parts of a message do not travel over a unique route from the source to the destination. In this way, the proposed technique can avoid malicious or congested nodes without any previous knowledge about such a node. Simulation results using NS-2 show the proposed technique is valid. It is able to outperform other multipath routing protocols in all scenarios.
EmpiriST 2015: A Shared Task on the Automatic Linguistic Annotation of Computer-Mediated Communication and Web Corpora

This paper describes the goals, design and results of a shared task on the automatic linguistic annotation of German language data from genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC), social media interactions and Web corpora. The two sub-tasks of tokenization and part-of-speech tagging were performed on two data sets: (i) a genuine CMC data set with samples from several CMC genres, and (ii) a Web corpora data set of CC-licensed Web pages which represents the type of data found in large corpora crawled from the Web. The teams participating in the shared task achieved a substantial improvement over current off-the-shelf tools for German. The best tokenizer reached an F 1 - score of 99.57% (vs. 98.95% off-the-shelf baseline), while the best tagger reached an accuracy of 90.44% (vs. 84.86% baseline). The gold standard (more than 20,000 to-kens of training and test data) is freely available online together with detailed annotation guidelines.
On the numerical range of square matrices with coefficients in a degree 2 Galois field extension

Let $L$ be a degree $2$ Galois extension of the field $K$ and $M$ an $n\times n$ matrix with coefficients in $L$. Let $\langle \ ,\ \rangle : L^n\times L^n\to L$ be the sesquilinear form associated to the involution $L\to L$ fixing $K$. We use $\langle \ ,\ \rangle$ to define the numerical range $\mathrm{Num} (M)$ of $M$ (a subset of $L$), extending the classical case $K=\mathbb {R}$, $L=\mathbb {C}$ and the case of a finite field introduced by Coons, Jenkins, Knowles, Luke and Rault. There are big differences with respect to both cases for number fields and for all fields in which the image of the norm map $L\to K$ is not closed by addition, e.g., $c\in L$ may be an eigenvalue of $M$, but $c\notin \mathrm{Num} (M)$. We compute $\mathrm{Num} (M)$ in some case, mostly with $n=2$.
Vasopressin 1b Receptor Knock-Out Impairs Memory for Temporal Order

Mice lacking a functional vasopressin 1b receptor (Avpr1b) display decreased levels of aggression and social memory. Here, we used Avpr1b-knock-out (Avpr1b−/−) mice to examine whether an abnormality of this receptor results in specific cognitive deficits in the domain of hippocampal function. Avpr1b−/− mice were deficient in sociability and in detecting social novelty, extending previous findings of impairment in social recognition in these mutants. Avpr1b−/− mice could recognize previously explored objects and remember where they were experienced, but they were impaired in remembering the temporal order of presentation of those objects. Consistent with this finding, Avpr1b−/− mice were also impaired on an object–odor paired associate task that involved a temporal discontiguity between the associated elements. Finally, Avpr1b−/− mice performed normally in learning a set of overlapping odor discriminations and could infer relationships among odors that were only indirectly associated (i.e., transitive inference), indicating intact relational memory. The Avpr1b is expressed at much higher levels than any other part of the brain in the pyramidal cells of hippocampal CA2 area, a subfield of the hippocampus that has physiological and genetic properties that distinguish it from subfields CA1 and CA3. The combined results suggest that the Avpr1b, perhaps in CA2, may play a highly specific role in social behavior and episodic memory. Because schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are associated with a unique pathology in CA2 and impairments in both social behavior and episodic memory, this animal model could provide insights into the etiology of these disorders.
Higher-order structure of natural images

We present a statistical model for learning efficient codes of higher-order structure in natural images. The model, a non-linear generalization of independent component analysis, replaces the standard assumption of independence for the joint distribution of coefficients with a distribution that is adapted to the variance structure of the coefficients of an efficient image basis. This offers a novel description of higher order image structure and provides a way to learn coarse-coded, sparse-distributed representations of abstract image properties such as object location, scale, and texture.
Mappings Make Data Processing Go 'Round An Inter-paradigmatic Mapping Tutorial

Whatever programming paradigm for data processing we choose, data has the tendency to live on the other side or to eventually end up there. The major paradigms for data processing are Cobol, object, relational and XML; each paradigm offers many facets and many versions; each paradigm provides specific forms of data models (object models, relational schemas, XML schemas, etc.). Each data-processing application depends on a horde of interrelated data models and artifacts that are derived from data models (such as data-access layers). Such conglomerations of data models are challenging due to paradigmatic impedance mismatches, performance requirements, loose-coupling requirements, and others. This ubiquitous problem calls for a good understanding of techniques for mappings between data models, actual data, and operations on data. This tutorial lists and discusses mapping scenarios, mapping techniques, impedance mismatches and research challenges regarding mappings.
Prevention of irradiation-induced salivary hypofunction by rapamycin in swine parotid glands

Radiotherapy is commonly used in patients with oral cavity and pharyngeal cancers, usually resulting in irreversible salivary hypofunction. Currently management of radiation damage to salivary glands still remains a great challenge. Recent studies show that activation of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) occurs in salivary gland lesions, making it possible to apply mTOR inhibitor for treatment. Our results indicate inhibition of mTOR by rapamycin significantly alleviated irradiation-induced salivary hypofunction by restoring 46% salivary flow rate and protecting histological structures in swine. Furthermore, rapamycin protected human submandibular gland cell line (HSG) from irradiation-induced cell depletion and loss of cell proliferation capacity. These findings lay the foundation for a new clinical application of rapamycin to prevent irradiation-induced salivary hypofunction.
The Still-Life Density Problem and its Generalizations

A "still Life" is a subset S of the square lattice Z^2 fixed under the transition rule of Conway's Game of Life, i.e. a subset satisfying the following three conditions: 1. No element of Z^2-S has exactly three neighbors in S; 2. Every element of S has at least two neighbors in S; 3. Every element of S has at most three neighbors in S. Here a ``neighbor'' of any x \in Z^2 is one of the eight lattice points closest to x other than x itself. The "still-Life conjecture" is the assertion that a still Life cannot have density greater than 1/2 (a bound easily attained, for instance by {(x,y): x is even}). We prove this conjecture, showing that in fact condition 3 alone ensures that S has density at most 1/2. We then consider variations of the problem such as changing the number of allowed neighbors or the definition of neighborhoods; using a variety of methods we find some partial results and many new open problems and conjectures.
Enablers and Barriers of Cloud Adoption among Small and Medium Enterprises in Tamil Nadu

Cloud computing has the potential to speed up IT adoption among SMEs in developing economies. Though the benefits of cloud computing is very appealing, the level of cloud adoption is still low among SMEs. This research aims to identify the key enablers, barriers and other factors that influence cloud adoption among SMEs in Tamil Nadu by conducting empirical investigations. We have used TOE framework to identify and capture the factors that affect technology adoption. We highlight cost benefits of using cloud infrastructure, scalability and agility of cloud services as the key enablers of cloud adoption. Broadband availability, high bandwidth cost and vendor lock-in are the main barrier for cloud adoption. Compatibility to existing system, complexity of the migration process, top management support, government policies and competitor pressure are the major organizational factors affecting cloud adoption among SMEs in Tamil Nadu. This study is part of a larger study which aims to develop a cloud migration decision support system (CMDSS) for SMEs in Tamil Nadu.
Cartilage turnover assessed with a newly developed assay measuring collagen type II degradation products: influence of age, sex, menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and body mass index

Background: Cartilage normally has a slow turnover but in arthritis increased metabolism results in degradation of the tissue. Objective: To assess cartilage turnover in a sample of the general population by an assay measuring cartilage derived urinary collagen type II (CTX-II) C-telopeptide degradation products. Methods: CTX-II concentrations were measured in urine samples from 615 healthy men and women aged 20–87 years, and the influence of age, sex, menopause, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and body mass index (BMI) was assessed. Results: CTX-II concentrations showed age dependent variations, with notable differences between men and women. Mean (SD) CTX-II concentration in postmenopausal women (220 (118) ng/mmol, n=25) was significantly higher than in an age matched group of premenopausal women (112 (79) ng/mmol, n=26, p<0.001). CTX-II concentration in women using HRT (118 (57) ng/mmol, n=50) was significantly lower than in an age and BMI matched group of women not receiving HRT (215 (99) ng/mmol, n=50, p<0.001). In subjects with a BMI ≥25 kg/m2, CTX-II concentrations were significantly higher than in those with a BMI <25 kg/m2 (185 (114) v 148 (91) ng/mmol, p<0.001). Conclusions: Cartilage turnover, as assessed by measuring urinary degradation products of CTX-II varies considerably with age, and significant differences between CTX-II levels in men and women as well as in pre- and postmenopausal women are found. Further studies are required to validate the marker for assessing cartilage degradation in arthritis.
Applying problem-structuring methods to problems in computer security

Solutions to security problems, particularly ones involving cryptography, have typically been approached through the Inside-Out Threat Model, "this is our solution and whatever it addresses is the threat". Email encryption/signing and SSL/TLS are two examples of the Inside-Out Threat Model, with the existence of a multi-billion dollar global cybercrime industry testifying to the fact that the threat-modelling performed during the design process was aimed more at satisfying the cryptographers' rather than the end users' needs. This paper looks at the application of problem-structuring methods or PSMs, a technique from the field of social planning, to address computer security problems, not so much to define technical solutions but to help analyse the problem so that the most appropriate, rather than simply the most technologically trendy, solution is applied to the problem.
1 Interference Channels : A Review

An Interference Channel (IC) models the situation where a number (N ) of independent transmitters try to communicate their separate information to N different receivers via a common channel. There is a strict one-to-one correspondence between transmitters and receivers. Consequently, the transmission of information from each source to its corresponding receiver interferes with the communication between the other Transmitters and their receivers. The interference channel can therefore be viewed as being comprised of N principal links and N(N − 1) interference links. An example of an IC is when far end cross talk occurs between two twisted pair cables in the same binder in a DSL.
Enclosed coaxial waveguide antenna array for a ground-penetrating radar

In this paper the phased array of enclosed coaxial waveguides has been theoretically considered as antenna for ground-penetrating radar. The reflected and transmitted signals were obtained using the inverse Fourier transform. The reflection and transmission coefficients for the elements of array with monochromatic excitation can be founded using the variational principle in single-mode approximation. Some numerical results for array of two enclosed coaxial waveguides with a pulse excitation are presented.
Unsupervised Part-of-speech Tagging

Diierent approaches have been taken in order to solve the part-of-speech tagging problem. Several methods for unsupervised tagging have obtained good accuracies in practice. The approach taken by Brill Bri95] obtains results comparable to the best existing taggers. In this paper we explore the details of this unsupervised part-of-speech tagger and we present a comparison to the Xerox tagger, which is reportedly the best tagger available at the moment.
Packet-mode scheduling in input-queued cell-based switches

We consider input-queued switch architectures dealing at their interfaces with variable-size packets, but internally operating on fixed-size cells. Packets are segmented into cells at input ports, transferred through the switching fabric, and reassembled at output ports. Cell transfers are controlled by a scheduling algorithm, which operates in packet-mode: all cells belonging to the same packet are transferred from inputs to outputs without interruption. We prove that input-queued switches using packet-mode scheduling can achieve 100% throughput, and we show by simulation that, depending on the packet size distribution, packet-mode scheduling may provide advantages over cell-mode scheduling.
HMM Based Method for Dynamic Texture Detection

A method for detection of dynamic textures in video is proposed. It is observed that the motion vectors of most of the dynamic textures (e.g. sea waves, swaying tree leaves and branches in the wind, etc.) exhibit random motion. On the other hand, regular motion of ordinary video objects has well-defined directions. In this paper, motion vectors of moving objects are estimated and tracked based on a minimum distance based metric. The direction of the motion vectors are then quantized to define two three-state Markov models corresponding to dynamic textures and ordinary moving objects with consistent directions. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are used to classify the moving objects in the final step of the algorithm.