Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Mediating Effects of Psycho-Social Factors on the Relationship between Economic Status and Adolescent Health

The aim of this study is to investigate the possible mediating effects of psycho-social factors on economic status and health among middle and high school students in South Korea. Analysis through SPSS 21.0 was conducted using data form 1,088 middle and high school students. First, the results show that economic status effected adolescent health negatively and psycho-social factors effected adolescent health positively. Second, the psycho-social factors which are self-esteem, parent attachment, community satisfaction partially mediated the effects of economic status on adolescent health. Based on these results, the present study suggests implications for improving of adolescent health.
Hyperphagia-mediated Obesity in Transgenic Mice Misexpressing the RNA-editing Enzyme ADAR2*

ADAR2 is a double-stranded RNA-specific adenosine deaminase involved in the editing of mammalian RNAs by the site-specific conversion of adenosine to inosine. To examine the physiologic consequences resulting from ADAR2 misexpression, we have generated mutant mice expressing either wild-type or deaminase-deficient ADAR2 transgenes under the control of the human cytomegalovirus promoter. Transgenic mice expressing either wild-type or inactive ADAR2 isoforms demonstrated adult onset obesity characterized by hyperglycemia, hyperleptinemia, and increased adiposity. Paired feeding analysis revealed that mutant mice on caloric restriction had a growth rate and body composition indistinguishable from wild-type littermates, indicating that the observed obesity predominantly results from hyperphagia rather than a metabolic derangement. The observation that expression of catalytically inactive ADAR2 also is capable of producing an obese phenotype in mutant animals suggests that ADAR2 may possess additional biological activities beyond those required for the site-selective deamination of adenosine or may interfere with the actions of other double-stranded RNA-specific binding proteins in the cell.
Algorithms for symbolic/numeric control of affine dynamical systems

We consider a general linear dynamical system and want to control its behavior. The goal is to reach a given target by minimizing a cost function. We provide a new generic algorithm with together exact, symbolic and numerical modules. In particular new efficient methods computing a block Kalman canonical exact decomposition and the optimal solutions are presented. We also propose a new numerical algorithm under-approximating the controllable domain in view of its analytical resolution in the context of singular sub-arcs.
Passive Duplicate Address-Detection Schemes for On-Demand Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Internet protocol (IP) auto-configuration in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has attracted much attention. Efficient duplicate address detection (DAD) schemes should be devised to provide each node with its unique address in the network. Generally, DAD schemes can be categorized into two classes: 1) active DAD and 2) passive DAD (PDAD). In this paper, we focus on PDAD schemes over on-demand ad hoc routing protocols. Specifically, we have three goals: 1) improving the accuracy of detecting address conflicts; 2) improving the successful detection success ratio; and 3) reducing the time taken to detect these conflicts. Unlike current approaches, we propose several schemes that exploit additional information, such as sequence number, location, and neighbor knowledge. Simulation results show that our approaches achieve better accuracy and shorter time to detect conflict addresses when compared with existing schemes.
Data Science and Decision Support at ERIC

ERIC is the French acronym for Entrepots, Representation et Ingenierie des Connaissances, which literally translates into “Warehouses, Representation and Knowledge Engineering”. The ERIC laboratory was created in 1995 and is a joint research unit of two of the three universities in Lyon, both ranked among top universities in France and Europe in their respective fields: Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, a university of science and medicine, and Universite Lumiere Lyon 2, a university of humanities and social sciences. ERIC is also a member of the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, a federative institute related to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Research at ERIC aims at extracting value from huge, complex databases, especially (but not exclusively) in the fields of humanities. Our expertise lies in the following domains (Figure 1): 1) data warehousing: intelligent integration of complex data, multidimensional modeling of complex objects, personalized on-line analysis processing (OLAP), data warehouse security; 2) data mining and decision: machine learning, graph study and graph mining, complex data analysis, multicriteria aggregation, opinion mining, data mining software. ERIC is constituted of two research teams: Decision support Information Systems (SID in French) and Data Mining and Decision (DMD), which address the two aforementioned domains, respectively. Overall, about 50 people regularly work at ERIC, including 6 full professors, 16 associate professors, 25 Ph.D. students and 1 to 3 postdoctoral fellows, depending on the period. Eventually, the ERIC laboratory is involved in numerous academic and industrial partnerships all around the world, and promotes its research fields by steering and organizing both domestic (e.g., EGC and EDA, both referenced in DBLP) and international events (e.g., the ALT/DS 2012 joint conferences or the VLDB Cloud Intelligence workshop). Figure 1: ERIC’s Research Topics
Polymorphisms in the IL-1A Gene are Correlated with Levels of Interleukin-1α Protein in Gingival Crevicular Fluid of Teeth with Severe Periodontal Disease

Interleukin-1 (IL-1) is a potent stimulator of bone resorption and is strongly implicated in the destruction due to bystander damage seen in periodontal disease. Recent studies suggest that polymorphisms of the (IL-1) gene complex may be significant risk factors for a number of chronic inflammatory diseases. The severity of periodontal disease has been positively associated with carriage of allele 2 at position -889 of the IL-1A gene in conjunction with allele 2 of the 1L-1B gene at position +3953. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that allele 2 of the IL-1A gene at position -889 might act to elevate levels of IL-la protein in patients with periodontal disease. Since levels of IL-la protein are low in healthy individuals, we used a group of patients with severe periodontal disease to investigate if levels of IL-1α protein in gingival crevicular fluid can be correlated to patient genotype. IL-la levels were measured by enzyme immunoassay in 46 patients with severe periodontal disease. These patients were genotyped by PCR and allele-specific restriction digests. The carriage rate for allele 2 in the diseased population was 68%. Overall, the carriage of allele 2 was associated with almost a four-fold increase in IL-la protein levels. Differences were most pronounced in non-smokers, while heavy smokers showed reduced levels of IL-1α protein regardless of genotype. These results suggest a mechanism whereby this genetic polymorphism acts to modulate IL-la protein production and may influence the pathogenesis of periodontal disease by affecting the extent of IL-1-associated bystander damage.
Immunosuppressive treatment affects cardiac and skeletal muscle mitochondria by the toxic effect of vehicle.

In order to examine whether immunosuppressive treatment could be responsible for the reduced exercise capacity of heart transplant recipients (HTR), we studied the effects of long-term immunosuppressive treatment with cyclosporin A (CsA) and its vehicle (2/3 cremophor and 1/3 alcohol diluted in olive oil) on in situ mitochondrial respiration of different muscles. Rats were fed for 3 weeks with 10 or 25 mg/kg/day CsA in its vehicle (CsA10 and CsA25 groups), or vehicle or H(2)O. Oxygen consumption rate was measured in saponin skinned fibers without (V(0)) and with ADP until maximal respiration (V(max)) was reached and K(M)for ADP as well as V(max)were calculated using non-linear fit of the Michaelis-Menten equation. In the cardiac muscle of the CsA25 group, V(0)and V(max)were decreased by immunosuppressive treatment respectively from 6.33+/-0.51 to 3.18+/-0.3micromol O(2)/min/g dw (P<0.001) and from 29.0+/-1.5 to 18.1+/-1.6micromol O(2)/min/g dw (P<0.001), an effect which could be entirely attributed to the vehicle itself, with no difference between CsA10 and CsA25. Regulation of cardiac mitochondrial respiration by ADP was altered by vehicle with the K(M)for ADP decreasing from 371+/-37 to 180+/-21microm(P<0.001). A similar trend was observed in the diaphragm or soleus, although to a lesser extent. In contrast, V(0)and V(max)decreased in glycolytic gastrocnemius muscle respectively from 1.7+/-0.2 to 0.94+/-0.14 (P<0. 01) and from 6.8+/-0.3 to 5.1+/-0.4micromol O(2)/min/g dw (P<0.001) in the CsA25 group, but the main effects could be attributed to CsA itself. It was concluded that immunosuppressive treatment induces a deleterious effect on cardiac and skeletal muscle oxidative capacities, mainly due to cremophor, the main component of vehicle.
SRAM local bit line access failure analyses

Due to the increasing process parameter variations and bitline capacitance, design of fast, reliable and robust read/write circuits for nanoscale SRAMs is a challenge. In this paper, we have investigated the effect of threshold voltage variations on the stability of read and write access schemes in SRAM designs. We considered three small signals read out and two write schemes to establish the SRAM local bitline failure trends and behavior under aggressive timing constraints and in the presence of process variations. The critical transistors in both the memory cell and the sense circuits are determined using corner analyses. Detailed simulation analyses are then performed by randomly varying the threshold voltages of these critical transistors, and the failing probabilities and points are then determined. Observations and conclusions on the failure trends of both the read and write operations are presented
Accepted for Publication in Ieee Transactions on Information Theory. Degrees of Freedom of the Network Mimo Channel with Distributed Csi

—In this work, we discuss the joint precoding with finite rate feedback in the so-called network MIMO where the TXs share the knowledge of the data symbols to be transmitted. We introduce a distributed channel state information (DCSI) model where each TX has its own local estimate of the overall multiuser MIMO channel and must make a precoding decision solely based on the available local CSI. We refer to this channel as the DCSI-MIMO channel and the precoding problem as distributed precoding. We extend to the DCSI setting the work from Jindal in [1] for the conventional MIMO Broadcast Channel (BC) in which the number of Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) achieved by Zero Forcing (ZF) was derived as a function of the scaling in the logarithm of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the number of quantizing bits. Particularly, we show the seemingly pessimistic result that the number of DoFs at each user is limited by the worst CSI across all users and across all TXs. This is in contrast to the conventional MIMO BC where the number of DoFs at one user is solely dependent on the quality of the estimation of his own feedback. Consequently, we provide precoding schemes improving on the achieved number of DoFs. For the two-user case, the derived novel precoder achieves a number of DoFs limited by the best CSI accuracy across the TXs instead of the worst with conventional ZF. We also advocate the use of hierarchical quantization of the CSI, for which we show that considerable gains are possible. Finally, we use the previous analysis to derive the DoFs optimal allocation of the feedback bits to the various TXs under a constraint on the size of the aggregate feedback in the network, in the case where conventional ZF is used.
Molecular Architecture of the Regulatory Locus sae of Staphylococcus aureus and Its Impact on Expression of Virulence Factors

ABSTRACT We characterized the sae operon, a global regulator for virulence gene expression in Staphylococcus aureus. A Tn917 sae mutant was obtained by screening a Tn917 library of the agr mutant ISP479Mu for clones with altered hemolytic activity. Sequence analysis of the sae operon revealed two additional open reading frames (ORFs) (ORF3 and ORF4) upstream of the two-component regulatory genes saeR and saeS. Four overlapping sae-specific transcripts (T1 to T4) were detected by Northern blot analysis, and the transcriptional initiation points were mapped by primer extension analysis. The T1, T2, and T3 mRNAs are probably terminated at the same stem-loop sequence downstream of saeS. The T1 message (3.1 kb) initiates upstream of ORF4, T2 (2.4 kb) initiates upstream of ORF3, and T3 (2.0 kb) initiates in front of saeR. T4 (0.7 kb) represents a monocistronic mRNA encompassing ORF4 only. sae-specific transcripts were detectable in all of the 40 different clinical S. aureus isolates investigated. Transcript levels were at maximum during the post-exponential growth phase. The sae mutant showed a significantly reduced rate of invasion of human endothelial cells, consistent with diminished transcription and expression of fnbA. The expression of type 5 capsular polysaccharide is activated in the sae mutant of strain Newman, as shown by immunofluorescence and promoter-reporter fusion experiments. In summary, the sae operon constitutes a four-component regulator system which acts on virulence gene expression in S. aureus.
Comparison of extrinsic efferent innervation of guinea pig distal colon and rectum

The extrinsic efferent innervation of the distal colon and rectum of the guinea pig was compared, by using retrograde tracing combined with immunohistochemistry. Application of the carbocyanine tracer DiI to the rectum filled significantly greater numbers of extrinsic neurons than similar injections into the distal colon. Approximately three‐fourths of all filled neurons from either location were either sympathetic or parasympathetic; the rest were spinal sensory neurons. Nerve cell bodies in sympathetic prevertebral ganglia labelled from the two regions were similar in number. Both regions were innervated by sympathetic neurons in paravertebral ganglia; however, the rectum received much more input from this source than the colon. The rectum received significantly more input from pelvic ganglia than the colon. The rectum also received direct innervation from two groups of neurons in the spinal cord. Neurons located in the spinal parasympathetic nucleus in segment S2 and S3 were labelled by DiI injected into the rectal wall. Similar numbers of neurons, located in intermediolateral cell column and dorsal commissural nucleus of lumbar segments, also projected directly to rectum, but not colon. The great majority (>80%) of retrogradely labelled nerve cell bodies in sympathetic ganglia were immunoreactive for tyrosine hydroxylase. In pelvic ganglia, retrogradely labelled neurons contained choline acetyltransferase and/or nitric oxide synthase or tyrosine hydroxylase. Although the rectum and colon in this species are continuous and macroscopically indistinguishable, they have significantly different patterns of extrinsic efferent innervation, presumably reflecting their different functions. J. Comp. Neurol. 496:787–801, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Implementation of new services to support ubiquitous computing for town life

The various services that make up the ubiquitous computing concept have developed with the rapid growth of wireless Internet environments and mobile devices. The major purpose of this research is to provide a context-aware U-Town environment to users by utilizing sensors and mobile devices currently available in the public sector and the marketplace. In this paper, the first step of the UTOPIA (Ubiquitous computing TOwn Project: Intelligent context Awareness) project is to introduce the U-Campus service (Ubiquitous computing for the campus). The paper introduces services such as the U-Restaurant, U-Museum, and the U-Theme Park, which are the second step of the U-Town project. In addition, we introduce the MoCE (Mobile Context Explorer) architecture, which is the context-aware recognition technology used to realize U-Town project services.
Formation of Globular Clusters in Galaxy Mergers

We present a high-resolution simulation of globular cluster formation in a galaxy merger. For the first time in such a simulation, individual star clusters are directly identified and followed on their orbits. We quantitatively compare star formation in the merger to that in the unperturbed galaxies. The merging galaxies show a strong starburst, in sharp contrast to their isolated progenitors. Most star clusters form in the tidal features. With a mass range of 5 × 105-5 × 106 M☉, they are identified as globular clusters. The merger remnant is an elliptical galaxy. Clusters with different masses or ages have different radial distributions in the galaxy. Our results show that the high specific frequency and bimodal distribution of metallicity observed in elliptical galaxies are natural products of gas-rich mergers, supporting a merger origin for the ellipticals and their globular cluster systems.
FLAIR and Diffusion MRI Signals Are Independent Predictors of White Matter Hyperintensities

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: WMH, associated with cognitive decline and cardiovascular risk factors, may represent only the extreme end of a more widespread continuous WM injury process that progresses during aging and is poorly understood. We investigated the ability of FLAIR and DTI to characterize the longitudinal course of WMH development. MATERIALS AND METHODS: One hundred nineteen participants (mean age, 74.5 ± 7.4), including cognitively healthy elders and subjects diagnosed with Alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment, received a comprehensive clinical evaluation and brain MR imaging, including FLAIR and DTI on 2 dates. The risk for each baseline normal-appearing WM voxel to convert into WMH was modeled as a function of baseline FA (model M1) and both baseline FA and standardized FLAIR (M2). Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and AUC for predicting conversion to WMH were compared between models. RESULTS: Independent of clinical diagnosis, lower baseline FA (P < .001, both models) and higher baseline FLAIR intensity (P < .001, M2) were independently associated with increased risk for conversion from normal WM to WMH. M1 exhibited higher sensitivity but lower specificity, accuracy, and AUC compared with M2. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide further evidence that WMH result from a continuous process of WM degeneration with time. Stepwise decreases in WM integrity as measured by both DTI and FLAIR were independently associated with stepwise increases in WMH risk, emphasizing that these modalities may provide complementary information for understanding the time course of aging-associated WM degeneration.
An interpolated frequency-hopping spread-spectrum transceiver

A technique of spread-spectrum transmission, interpolated frequency-hopping (IFH), is presented. IFH employs a carrier that moves smoothly and continuously in frequency, helping to alleviate problems, such as spectral splatter and transient mismatch, which are a concern in conventional phase-locked loop (PLL)-based frequency-hopping spread-spectrum systems. In IFH, the pseudorandom hopping code is passed through a digital interpolation filter prior to controlling the synthesizer instantaneous frequency output. While such filtering is commonly used in data pulse-shaping to improve the spectral characteristics of the modulated carrier, such filtering has not been reported for IFH codes, where the frequency deviations are changing and can span several MHz. The implications of matching the transient responses of two PLL-based frequency synthesizers using this method have also not been reported. Initial simulation and laboratory measurements indicate that, for certain cases, IFH shows a 1.9 dB improvement in received IF power, has a much sharper roll-off of inband phase noise when compared to conventional hopping, and provides a phase-coherent IF after despreading. An IFH transceiver system using /spl Delta/-/spl Sigma/ frequency synthesis and a /spl Delta/-/spl Sigma/ frequency discriminator is proposed. The system would be suitable for integrated mobile radio applications in slow-fading environments.
Memory consolidation of Pavlovian fear conditioning requires nitric oxide signaling in the lateral amygdala

Nitric oxide (NO) has been widely implicated in synaptic plasticity and memory formation. In studies of long‐term potentiation (LTP), NO is thought to serve as a ‘retrograde messenger’ that contributes to presynaptic aspects of LTP expression. In this study, we examined the role of NO signaling in Pavlovian fear conditioning. We first show that neuronal nitric oxide synthase is localized in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA), a critical site of plasticity in fear conditioning. We next show that NO signaling is required for LTP at thalamic inputs to the LA and for the long‐term consolidation of auditory fear conditioning. Collectively, the findings suggest that NO signaling is an important component of memory formation of auditory fear conditioning, possibly as a retrograde signal that participates in presynaptic aspects of plasticity in the LA.
Multivariate Meta-Analysis of Heterogeneous Studies Using Only Summary Statistics: Efficiency and Robustness

Meta-analysis has been widely used to synthesize evidence from multiple studies for common hypotheses or parameters of interest. However, it has not yet been fully developed for incorporating heterogeneous studies, which arise often in applications due to different study designs, populations, or outcomes. For heterogeneous studies, the parameter of interest may not be estimable for certain studies, and in such a case, these studies are typically excluded from conventional meta-analysis. The exclusion of part of the studies can lead to a nonnegligible loss of information. This article introduces a meta-analysis for heterogeneous studies by combining the confidence density functions derived from the summary statistics of individual studies, hence referred to as the CD approach. It includes all the studies in the analysis and makes use of all information, direct as well as indirect. Under a general likelihood inference framework, this new approach is shown to have several desirable properties, including: (i) it is asymptotically as efficient as the maximum likelihood approach using individual participant data (IPD) from all studies; (ii) unlike the IPD analysis, it suffices to use summary statistics to carry out the CD approach. Individual-level data are not required; and (iii) it is robust against misspecification of the working covariance structure of parameter estimates. Besides its own theoretical significance, the last property also substantially broadens the applicability of the CD approach. All the properties of the CD approach are further confirmed by data simulated from a randomized clinical trials setting as well as by real data on aircraft landing performance. Overall, one obtains a unifying approach for combining summary statistics, subsuming many of the existing meta-analysis methods as special cases.