Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deletions in the cytoplasmic domain of platelet-endothelial cell adhesion molecule-1 (PECAM-1, CD31) result in changes in ligand binding properties

Platelet/endothelial cell adhesion molecule-1 (PECAM-1, CD31) is a member of the immunoglobulin superfamily present on platelets, endothelial cells, and leukocytes that may function as a vascular cell adhesion molecule. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the cytoplasmic domain in PECAM-1 function. To accomplish this, wild- type and mutated forms of PECAM-1 cDNA were transfected into murine fibroblasts and the functional characteristics of the cells analyzed. Wild-type PECAM-1 localized to the cell-cell borders of adjacently transfected cells and mediated heterophilic, calcium-dependent L-cell aggregation that was inhibitable by a polyclonal and two monoclonal anti-PECAM-1 antibodies. A mutant protein lacking the entire cytoplasmic domain did not support aggregation or move to cell-cell borders. In contrast, both forms of PECAM-1 with partially truncated cytoplasmic domains (missing either the COOH-terminal third or two thirds of the cytoplasmic domain) localized to cell-cell borders in 3T3 cells in a manner analogous to the distribution seen in cultured endothelial cells. L-cells expressing these mutants demonstrated homophilic, calcium-independent aggregation that was blocked by the polyclonal anti-PECAM-1 antibody, but not by the two bioactive monoclonal antibodies. Although changes in the cytoplasmic domain of other receptors have been shown to alter ligand-binding affinity, to our knowledge, PECAM-1 is the first example of a cell adhesion molecule where changes in the cytoplasmic domain result in a switch in the basic mechanism of adhesion leading to different ligand-binding specificity. Variations in the cytoplasmic domain could thus be a potential mechanism for regulating PECAM-1 activity in vivo.
Clinical and epidemiological analyses of human pythiosis in Thailand.

BACKGROUND Pythiosis is an emerging and life-threatening infectious disease in humans and animals that is caused by the pathogenic oomycete Pythium insidiosum. Human pythiosis is found mostly in Thailand, although disease in animals has been increasingly reported worldwide. Clinical information on human pythiosis is limited, and health care professionals are unfamiliar with the disease, leading to underdiagnosis, delayed treatment, and poor prognosis. METHODS To retrospectively study the clinical and epidemiological features of human pythiosis, we analyzed clinical data from patients with pythiosis diagnosed during the period of January 1985 through June 2003 at 9 tertiary care hospitals throughout Thailand. RESULTS A total of 102 cases of human pythiosis were documented nationwide. A substantial proportion (40%) of cases occurred in the last 4 years of the 18-year study interval. Clinical presentations fell into 4 groups: cutaneous/subcutaneous cases (5% of cases), vascular cases (59%), ocular cases (33%), and disseminated cases (3%). Almost all patients with cutaneous/subcutaneous, vascular, and disseminated pythiosis (85%) had underlying thalassemia-hemoglobinopathy syndrome. Most ocular cases (84%) were associated with no underlying disease. A majority of the patients were male (71%), were aged 20-60 years (86%), and reported an agricultural occupation (75%). Regarding treatment outcomes, all patients with disseminated infection died; 78% of patients with vascular disease required limb amputation, and 40% of these patients died; and 79% of patients with ocular pythiosis required enucleation/evisceration. CONCLUSIONS Here, we report, to our knowledge, the largest case study of human pythiosis. The disease has high rates of morbidity and mortality. Early diagnosis and effective treatment are urgently needed to improve clinical outcomes. Because P. insidiosum is distributed worldwide and can infect healthy individuals, an awareness of human pythiosis should be promoted in Thailand and in other countries.
A Truncated Projected Newton-Type Algorithm for Large-Scale Semi-infinite Programming

In this paper, a truncated projected Newton-type algorithm is presented for solving large-scale semi-infinite programming problems. This is a hybrid method of a truncated projected Newton direction and a modified projected gradient direction. The truncated projected Newton method is used to solve the constrained nonlinear system. In order to guarantee global convergence, a robust loss function is chosen as the merit function, and the projected gradient method inserted is used to decrease the merit function. This algorithm is suitable for handling large-scale problems and possesses superlinear convergence rate. The global convergence of this algorithm is proved and the convergence rate is analyzed. The detailed implementation is discussed, and some numerical tests for solving large-scale semi-infinite programming problems, with examples up to 2000 decision variables, are reported.
The Evolving Science of Language Evolution

Concomitant with the ascendance of biolinguistics on the research agenda, the evolution of language has garnered considerable interest in the past decade. The Evolution of Language by cognitive biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch rides this current wave of popularity, surveying and synthesizing a broad range of recent developments in the field, yet one of the major currents which runs throughout the work is that interest in this strand of human cognitive evolution was strong throughout the twentieth century (and before), contrary to those who cite the 1861 Paris Linguistics Society ban as enforcing silence only broken a good 130 years later by Bickerton (1990) and Pinker & Bloom (1990). Another welcome theme which Fitch stresses repeatedly (see especially p. 175‐176) is that we must look past the false dichotomy between “continuist” and “discontinuist” theories of language evolution, seeking a middle ground which acknowledges parts of the language faculty which we share with our primate ancestors as well as those which we do not. Fitch approaches what Christiansen & Kirby (2003) have called “the hardest problem in science”, that of determining how humans developed the unique capacity for language, from the perspective that modern linguistics and biology have made it possible to refine earlier proposals but have not generated many truly new ideas. All the modern theories can be roughly categorized in terms of which type of proto-language they posit — lexical, gestural, or musical — each of these views being rooted in older speculation. One of the major strengths of the book is the overview of these historical and contemporary proposals. In section 4 (the last of the volume’s four sections, each including at least three chapters), Fitch does an excellent job of presenting the views on proto-language held by Herder, Darwin, Muller, Monboddo, Jackendoff, Lieberman, Deacon, Arbib, Tallerman, Wray, and others. The strengths and shortcomings of each proposal are weighed in a “dispassionate survey of the available hypotheses” (p. 4), with an emphasis on the plausibility in each scenario of language emerging through mechanisms of natural selection, particularly kin selection. Fitch stresses that kin selection is the only way to circumvent the ‘free-rider problem’: Cooperation, in this case information sharing via communication, is not an evolutionarily stable strategy, so the emergence of cooperation in any species poses explanatory difficulty. In light of this, Fitch suggests in chapter 14 (following Dissanayake 1992
M-Fieldwork for Information Systems Students

Fieldwork has long been identified as providing students undertaking professional studies with a means of implementing theory into a real world context. In recent years some educators, particularly in the health sciences, have introduced mobile devices to support students' fieldwork learning. In many ways there is a natural link between fieldwork and mobile technology. In this paper we report on a trial to introduce mobile support into the study of information systems in the field. The experience showed that mobile devices can assist students collect data in richer, multimedia formats and make subsequent classroom presentations of their field study much more interesting. However, it also revealed certain usage and deployment issues with the mobile devices themselves which have implications for device selection and educational design.
WORK AND FAMILY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY.

The segregation of research in work and family life has paralleled the functional differentiation that occurred following the industrial revolution. Where the relations between work and family have been considered, relative salience, isomorphic tendencies, and the life cycle have been emphasized in explaining why a particular pattern prevails. To some extent a given pattern is explicable in terms of such antecedent individual attributes as social class, religion, or personality needs, but we argue that explanation of structured patterns in work-family relations is enhanced by the concept of "task. " Tasks implicitly presented to individuals during critical role transitions are dealt with according to the particular combination of personal, cultural and social determinants mobilized by the individuals concerned. Where critical transitions occur simultaneously in both work and family spheres, their mutual interdependence is highlighted, allowing the greatest freedom to choose an integrative pattern. A case study is presented to illustrate the efficacy of the task accomplishment frame of reference.
Social-behavior Transfer Learning for Recommendation Systems

Online recommendation systems are becoming more and more popular with the development of web. Data sparseness is a major problem for collaborative filtering (CF) techniques in recommender systems, especially for new users and items. In this paper, we try to reduce the data sparseness in the collaborative filtering problem by involving Wikipedia as an auxiliary information source. In this paper, we attempt to improve the recommendation accuracy by extracting collaborative social behavior information embedded in Wikipedia coediting history, and use this knowledge to help alleviate the data-sparsity problem in CF. In addition, we introduce a parallel computing algorithm to help scale up the transfer learning process. Our experimental results on two real world recommendation datasets show that the social co-editing knowledge in Wikipedia can be effectively transferred for CF problems.
Expression of the Multidrug-Resistance 1 (MDR1) Gene and Prognosis in Human Pancreatic Cancer

Multidrug-resistance 1 (MDR1) encodes a 170-kDa transmembrane glycoprotein (P-glycoprotein), which acts as a drug-efflux pump. In the present study, we analyzed the expression of MDR1/P-glycoprotein in human pancreatic cancer and correlated the results with clinical parameters. Pancreatic cancer tissue samples were obtained from 67 patients (30 female, 37 male) who underwent surgery. Normal pancreatic tissues obtained from 15 previously healthy organ donors (4 female, 11 male) served as controls. MDR1 mRNA levels were analyzed by Northern blotting, and the exact site of MDR1 mRNA expression was determined by in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry. Northern blot analysis indicated that in comparison with the normal pancreas, MDR1 mRNA levels were only increased 1.4-fold (p = 0.03) in the pancreatic cancer samples. However, there was a 2.9-fold (p < 0.01) increase in MDR1 mRNA levels when only the samples that exhibited increased expression (38%) were analyzed. In situ hybridization and immunohistochemical analysis showed that MDR1 was highly expressed in the cancer cells of these samples. Statistical analysis revealed that patients with high MDR1/P-glycoprotein expression had a shorter postoperative survival time compared with patients with weak to moderate expression of MDR1. On the basis of in situ hybridization, survival in the intense group was 11.6 (n = 12) versus 14.2 months (n = 42) in the mild to moderate group. On the basis of immunohistochemistry, survival in the intense group was 7.5 months (n = 10) versus 14.1 months (n = 40) in the mild to moderate group. Surprisingly, survival of patients with high expression of MDR1/P-glycoprotein was not significantly different from that of patients without detectable MDR1/P-glycoprotein expression. These findings suggest that both strong expression of MDR1/P-glycoprotein and lack of expression seem to influence tumor growth via known and yet unknown mechanisms.
Improved rotation-invariant degraded partial palmprint recognition technique

This paper presents a further improvement of the previously published technique, PP-RIDER (Partial Palmprint Rotation-Invariant and DEgraded Recognition). PP-RIDER technique combines Modified Phase-Only Correlation (MPOC) and Fourier-Mellin Transform (FMT), and was proposed for recognizing randomly-rotated and degraded partial palmprints with respect to full palmprints registered in a database. In this paper, the influence of the inside-lobe size for the MPOC technique in PP-RIDER is analyzed. In fact, MPOC may produce spurious peaks around the main correlation peak which, when using too small inside-lobe sizes, can affect negatively the similarity scores in genuine comparisons. The proposed improved version of PP-RIDER is tested using the modified THUPALMLAB and PV-TEST-PARTIAL databases. The experimental results show that the proposed modifications allow achieving an improved performance when compared to the baseline technique.
Performance analysis of code-aided iterative hard/soft decision-directed carrier phase recovery

Code-aided (CA) iterative carrier phase synchronizer can improve the phase estimation performance significantly. However, due to the coupling involved between phase recovery and decoding, most studies depend on extensive simulations rather than on theoretical analysis to evaluate the performance of CA phase recovery. In this paper, we propose analytical methods to fill this void. The first step is to model the cross-talks caused by phase offset as an additional Gaussian noise at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Then, a semi-analytical method is proposed to express the distribution of extrinsic information from channel decoder as a function of phase offset. Building on this model, both the open-loop and closed-loop performance of CA iterative hard/soft decision-directed phase synchronizers are derived in closed-form. The analytical results explicitly reveal how extrinsic information contributes to the performance improvement of carrier phase estimation. Monte Carlo simulation results corroborate that the proposed methods are able to accurately characterize the performance of CA iterative carrier phase recovery for systems with different channel codes.
Chemical characterization of latent fingerprints by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, mega electron volt secondary mass spectrometry, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and attenuated total reflection Fou

The first analytical intercomparison of fingerprint residue using equivalent samples of latent fingerprint residue and characterized by a suite of relevant techniques is presented. This work has never been undertaken, presumably due to the perishable nature of fingerprint residue, the lack of fingerprint standards, and the intradonor variability, which impacts sample reproducibility. For the first time, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, high-energy secondary ion mass spectrometry, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy are used to target endogenous compounds in fingerprints and a method is presented for establishing their relative abundance in fingerprint residue. Comparison of the newer techniques with the more established gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic imaging shows good agreement between the methods, with each method detecting repeatable differences between the donors, with the exception of matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization, for which quantitative analysis has not yet been established. We further comment on the sensitivity, selectivity, and practicability of each of the methods for use in future police casework or academic research.
A robust lane detection and departure warning system

In this work, we have developed a robust lane detection and departure warning technique. Our system is based on single camera sensor. For lane detection a modified Inverse Perspective Mapping using only a few extrinsic camera parameters and illuminant Invariant techniques is used. Lane markings are represented using a combination of 2nd and 4th order steerable filters, robust to shadowing. Effect of shadowing and extra sun light are removed using Lab color space, and illuminant invariant representation. Lanes are assumed to be cubic curves and fitted using robust RANSAC. This method can reliably detect lanes of the road and its boundary. This method has been experimented in Indian road conditions under different challenging situations and the result obtained were very good. For lane departure angle an optical flow based method were used.
The influence of the frequency and pattern of sympathetic nerve activity on serotonin N‐acetyltransferase in the rat pineal gland.

The activity of the pineal enzyme arylamine: N‐acetyltransferase (NAT) was determined following direct stimulation of the preganglionic or post‐ganglionic nerves of the superior cervical ganglia. 1. Stimulation of the preganglionic trunks at 10 c/sec during the day or night was sufficient to increase NAT activity approximately 50‐fold, to levels comparable to those observed at night in the intact animal. The time course of this effect of nerve stimulation differed between day and night. 2. The responses of pineal NAT to certain frequencies of stimulation were similar for preganglionic and post‐ganglionic stimulation. In both cases the responses to stimulation at 5 c/sec appeared to be maximal, 10 c/sec causing no further increase. However, at 10 c/sec, stimulation was more effective post‐ganglionically than preganglionically. 3. Various patterns of preganglionic stimulation, having the same average frequency, differed in their ability to increase the activity of NAT. Some, though not all, of these differences between patterns were observed during post‐ganglionic stimulation. 4. Unilateral stimulation of the preganglionic nerves produced an increase in NAT activity that was less than half the increase produced by bilateral stimulation, suggesting that the innervation from the two ganglia interact within the pineal gland. 5. These data indicate that changes in the firing rates of sympathetic nerves innervating the pineal gland, within the range of frequencies typically observed for sympathetic neurones, would be sufficient to account for the circadian rhythm in NAT activity observed in the intact rat. Changes in the over‐all pattern of sympathetic activity, in addition to changes in the total number of stimuli, could play a significant role in the pineal response.
AWillingness to Keep Learning

I the most valuable skill of a manager or leader at any level is their ability and willingness to learn. My wife calls this having a teachable spirit. Whether we are new to management or are a senior executive, we have to be willing to learn. I’ve taken lots of courses and seminars on how to manage and lead people but my most valuable teachings come from life experiences and studying other successful and unsuccessful leaders. Lessons that didn’t come from textbooks or speakers have had the most influence on how I lead people. If there was one piece of advice that I could give to all new managers who want to be successful, it is to watch and learn. My first life lesson as a manager has stuck with me my whole career. I vividly remember when I first entered management. I had just completed a master’s degree in management, and thought I knew what kind of leadership style best fit my personality and values. I quickly learned that one leadership style does not fit all people. Some people wanted to be empowered and left alone. Some people needed clear and daily direction. Some people needed more praise than others. In general, different people excelled or responded to different styles so I quickly learned the value of situational leadership. I think a similar thing can be said about how we manage projects. As large organizations, we tend to have rigid or one-size-fits-all processes. But we managers need to listen to our project leads and do what is going to make the project excel. It is easy to say that we have a process and we must follow it, but one-size-fits-all processes can be just as ineffective as one-size-fits-all leadership. Whether you are leading people or managing projects, the key to improving your contribution is your willingness to learn. Let me leave you with a few applicable quotes: • A leader who won’t listen when his people tell him he is going the wrong way is destined for a head-on collision. • A leader who doesn’t learn to become a better leader might as well not be one. • A leader who doesn’t learn from his mistakes will certainly repeat them. AWillingness to Keep Learning
Avoidance Behaviours and Missed Opportunities in a Case of Metastatic Squamous Cell Carcinoma

We describe the case of a 96-year-old woman who presented with a large fungating squamous cell carcinoma on her neck. In the Western hemisphere, it is rare to see patients with advanced tumours at their first presentation. We summarise the events leading to her late presentation to the hospital and explore the contributing factors. These may have included avoidance behaviour secondary to fears and misconceptions about cancer treatment. We conclude that healthcare professionals should be aware of these factors, and every effort should be made to address hidden fears and misconceptions when caring for patients with terminal illnesses. This will allay the patients' anxiety, thereby enabling them to make an informed choice about their future care.
Brain State-Dependent Closed-Loop Modulation of Paired Associative Stimulation Controlled by Sensorimotor Desynchronization

Background: Pairing peripheral electrical stimulation (ES) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) increases corticospinal excitability when applied with a specific temporal pattern. When the two stimulation techniques are applied separately, motor imagery (MI)-related oscillatory modulation amplifies both ES-related cortical effects—sensorimotor event-related desynchronization (ERD), and TMS-induced peripheral responses—motor-evoked potentials (MEP). However, the influence of brain self-regulation on the associative pairing of these stimulation techniques is still unclear. Objective: The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the effects of MI-related ERD during associative ES and TMS on subsequent corticospinal excitability. Method: The paired application of functional electrical stimulation (FES) of the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) muscle and subsequent single-pulse TMS (110% resting motor threshold (RMT)) of the contralateral primary motor cortex (M1) was controlled by beta-band (16–22 Hz) ERD during MI of finger extension and applied within a brain-machine interface environment in six healthy subjects. Neural correlates were probed by acquiring the stimulus-response curve (SRC) of both MEP peak-to-peak amplitude and area under the curve (AUC) before and after the intervention. Result: The application of approximately 150 pairs of associative FES and TMS resulted in a significant increase of MEP amplitudes and AUC, indicating that the induced increase of corticospinal excitability was mediated by the recruitment of additional neuronal pools. MEP increases were brain state-dependent and correlated with beta-band ERD, but not with the background EDC muscle activity; this finding was independent of the FES intensity applied. Conclusion: These results could be relevant for developing closed-loop therapeutic approaches such as the application of brain state-dependent, paired associative stimulation (PAS) in the context of neurorehabilitation.