Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The MADS29 Transcription Factor Regulates the Degradation of the Nucellus and the Nucellar Projection during Rice Seed Development[W]

This work reports the functional analysis of a Bsister gene in monocots. Rice MADS29 is highly expressed in reproductive stages and affects early seed development and grain filling by inducing maternal tissue degradation. The MADS box transcription factors are critical regulators of rice (Oryza sativa) reproductive development. Here, we here report the functional characterization of a rice MADS box family member, MADS29, which is preferentially expressed in the nucellus and the nucellar projection. Suppressed expression of MADS29 resulted in abnormal seed development; the seeds were shrunken, displayed a low grain-filling rate and suppressed starch biosynthesis, and contained abnormal starch granules. Detailed analysis indicated that the abnormal seed development is due to defective programmed cell death (PCD) of the nucellus and nucellar projection, which was confirmed by a TUNEL assay and transcriptome analysis. Further studies showed that expression of MADS29 is induced by auxin and MADS29 protein binds directly to the putative promoter regions of genes that encode a Cys protease and nucleotide binding site–Leu-rich repeat proteins, thereby stimulating the PCD. This study identifies MADS29 as a key regulator of early rice seed development by regulating the PCD of maternal tissues. It provides informative clues to elucidate the regulatory mechanism of maternal tissue degradation after fertilization and to facilitate the studies of endosperm development and seed filling.
Hypoxia: a stimulus for tissue plasminogen activator release in humans?

Six healthy male volunteers between the ages of 22 and 33 years inspired normoxic (20.9% O2) and hypoxic (10% O2) gas mixtures continuously for 15 min on separate days while resting supine. The order of testing was counterbalanced. Heart rates (b.min-1), minute ventilation (L.min-1), transcutaneous PO2 (mm Hg) and euglobulin lysis times (min) were determined at the onset and at regular intervals. Heart rates and minute ventilation increased significantly with most of the change occurring by min 5. Transcutaneous PO2 declined exponentially but stabilized by min 10. Euglobulin lysis time response was highly variable with individual changes from 2-38% observed. Further, the group appeared to fall into two classes that could be described as responders versus non-responders. The variability of these data suggest that hypoxia may not be a direct cause of tissue plasminogen activator release into the circulation but that susceptible individuals may exhibit a substantial fibrinolytic response to hypoxia. Those factors that explain the variability require further elucidation.
Performance Evaluation of an Adaptive and Robust Load Control Method for the Avoidance of Data-Contention Thrashing

Load control is necessary to prevent a database system from data-contention or memory-contention thrashing, caused by excessive lock conflicts or excessive buffer replacements that may occur due to temporary load peaks. The load control method that is adopted by virtually all commercial database systems is to limit the degree of multiprogramming (DMP), that is, the maximum number of transactions that are allowed to execute concurrently. Severe shortcomings of this DMP method are that it requires manual tuning by the human system administrator, and that it cannot react to dynamic changes of the transaction mix in the workload. In this paper we present a performance evaluation of an adaptive, that is, self-tuning load control method for the avoidance of data-contention thrashing. The basic principle of this method is to monitor a data-contention performance metric called the conflict ratio, and to react to critical changes of the conflict ratio by temporarilysuspending the admission of newly arriving transactions or by cancelling blocked transactions that block other transactions. In order to show the practical viability of our method, we have performed a performance evaluation based on page reference traces from the on-line transaction processing system of a large Swiss bank. The adaptive load control method copes well with the dynamic load fluctuations of this workload. It clearly outperforms the DMP method, since it adapts the system to the dynamic changes of the transaction mix whereas the DMP method uses a fixed DMP as a (bad) compromise for the entire duration of the experiment.
Effects of Structural Transparency in System Dynamics Simulators on Performance and Understanding

Prior exploration is an instructional strategy that has improved performance and understanding in system-dynamics-based simulators, but only to a limited degree. This study investigates whether model transparency, that is, showing users the internal structure of models, can extend the prior exploration strategy and improve learning even more. In an experimental study, participants in a web-based simulation learned about and managed a small developing nation. All participants were provided the prior exploration strategy but only half received prior exploration embedded in a structure-behavior diagram intended to make the underlying model’s structure more transparent. Participants provided with the more transparent strategy demonstrated better understanding of the underlying model. Their performance, however, was the equivalent to those in the less transparent condition. Combined with previous studies, our results suggest that while prior exploration is a beneficial strategy for both performance and understanding, making the model structure transparent with structure-behavior diagrams is more limited in its effect.
Blood flow velocity in the extraocular vessels in chronic smokers

AIMS To determine blood flow velocity in the extraocular vessels in healthy, chronic smokers and to compare these blood flow velocities with those of healthy non-smokers. METHODS In 46 healthy chronic smokers and 189 healthy non-smokers, peak systolic velocity (PSV), end diastolic velocity (EDV), and the resistivity index (RI) were measured in the ophthalmic artery (OA), central retinal artery (CRA), lateral short posterior ciliary artery (LPCA), and medial short posterior ciliary artery (MPCA) by means of a colour Doppler device, Siemens Quantum 2000.The maximal (max) and minimal (min) velocities were measured in the central retinal vein (CRV). Only one eye was measured in each subject, and right and left eyes were chosen randomly. Blood flow velocities were compared with one way MANOVA and t tests. The influence of age, sex, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, as well as heart rate on blood flow velocity and RI were evaluated by an analysis of covariance. The potential differences of the influence of the covariables on blood flow variables in smokers and non-smokers were tested by calculating the interactions. RESULTS In the majority of measured vessels blood flow velocity was higher in smokers than in non-smokers. This difference was statistically significant in the OA, CRV, and LPCA. The RI indices were equal or slightly lower in smokers. Furthermore, smokers had significantly lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Heart rate was higher in smokers but this difference did not reach statistical significance. CONCLUSIONS Colour Doppler measurements may differ significantly in smokers compared with non-smokers. Therefore, smoking habits should be considered when interpreting colour Doppler imaging results, and comparing different groups of diseased or healthy subjects.
Dynamic imaging and tracer kinetic modeling for emission tomography using rotating detectors

When performing dynamic studies using emission tomography the tracer distribution changes during acquisition of a single set of projections. This is particularly true for some positron emission tomography (PET) systems which, like single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), acquire data over a limited angle at any time, with full projections obtained by rotation of the detectors. In this paper, an approach is proposed for processing data from these systems, applicable to either PET or SPECT. A method of interpolation, based on overlapped parabolas, is used to obtain an estimate of the total counts in each pixel of the projections for each required frame-interval, which is the total time to acquire a single complete set of projections necessary for reconstruction. The resultant projections are reconstructed using traditional filtered backprojection (FBP) and tracer kinetic parameters are estimated using a method which relies on counts integrated over the frame-interval rather than instantaneous values. Simulated data were used to illustrate the technique's capabilities with noise levels typical of those encountered in either PET or SPECT. Dynamic datasets were constructed, based on kinetic parameters for fluoro-deoxy-glucose (FDG) and use of either a full ring detector or rotating detector acquisition. For the rotating detector, use of the interpolation scheme provided reconstructed dynamic images with reduced artefacts compared to unprocessed data or use of linear interpolation. Estimates for the metabolic rate of glucose had similar bias to those obtained from a full ring detector.
All along the watchtower: on the regulation of apoptosis regulators

Members of the expanding family of Bcl‐2‐like proteins have emerged as important regulators of programmed cell death, and recent studies have unearthed numerous mechanisms for regulating the function of these death agonists and antagonists. In addition to the transcriptional control of gene expression, these mechanisms include post‐translational events such as phosphorylation, proteolysis, and the induction of conformational changes, which may either activate or inactivate these molecules. Interaction with homologous and nonhomologous proteins and specific subcellular targeting of Bcl‐2‐like proteins are other means of fine‐tuning the cellular response to noxious stimuli. Recently, considerable attention has turned to the regulation of so‐called BH3‐only molecules, which appear to act as stress sensors that relay signals to other pro‐ or antiapoptotic family members. We discuss how the regulation of these apoptosis regulators may control the ultimate fate of the cell. —Fadeel, B. , Zhivotovsky, B. , Orrenius, S. All along the watchtower: on the regulation of apoptosis regulators. FASEB J. 13, 1647–1657 (1999)
The Long "Taile" of Typosquatting Domain Names

Typosquatting is a speculative behavior that leverages Internet naming and governance practices to extract profit from users' misspellings and typing errors. Simple and inexpensive domain registration motivates speculators to register domain names in bulk to profit from display advertisements, to redirect traffic to third party pages, to deploy phishing sites, or to serve malware. While previous research has focused on typosquatting domains which target popular websites, speculators also appear to be typosquatting on the "long tail" of the popularity distribution: millions of registered domain names appear to be potential typos of other site names, and only 6.8% target the 10,000 most popular . com domains. Investigating the entire distribution can give a more complete understanding of the typosquatting phenomenon. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of typosquatting domain registrations within the . com TLD. Our methodology helps us to significantly improve upon existing solutions in identifying typosquatting domains and their monetization strategies, especially for less popular targets. We find that about half of the possible typo domains identified by lexical analysis are truly typo domains. From our zone file analysis, we estimate that 20% of the total number of . com domain registrations are true typo domains and their number is increasing with the expansion of the . com domain space. This large number of typo registrations motivates us to review intervention attempts and implement efficient user-side mitigation tools to diminish the financial benefit of typosquatting to miscreants.
What Factors Contributed to the Success of Apple's iPhone?

Unknown to most North American consumers, a mobile data and Internet service in Japan called i-mode has been highly successful in that country for the past decade. Unfortunately, mobile data services in North America have lagged behind many European and Asian countries. However, the situation changed rapidly with the iPhone, launched in the US in June 2007. Consumers lined up for days for the chance to purchase one, and over 500, 000 units sold on the first weekend. Since that time, over 42 million iPhones have been sold, arguably making it one of the most successful mobile phone products ever launched. What is it that makes the iPhone such a success? In this paper we define a set of success criteria to investigate the success of the iPhone and propose a comprehensive success model. The success model can be used by both academics and practitioners to understand the reasons why, and ways to ensure that mobile data and commerce services become successful.
THE IMPACTS OF A NONINDIGENOUS MARINE PREDATOR IN A CALIFORNIA BAY

Coastal marine ecosystems worldwide are being altered rapidly by the invasion of nonindigenous species. Unlike terrestrial and freshwater systems, the impacts of an invading species have never been quantified on multiple trophic levels for a marine food web. We measured the impact of the nonindigenous green crab, Carcinus maenas, on a coastal marine food web in central California and found that this predator exerted strong “top-down” control, significantly reducing the abundances of several of the 20 invertebrate species monitored over a 9-yr period. Densities of native clams, Nutricola tantilla and Nutricola confusa, and native shore crabs, Hemigrapsus oregonensis, showed 5-fold to 10-fold declines within 3 yr of the arrival of green crabs. Field and laboratory experiments indicated that green crab predation caused these declines. We also tested for indirect responses of invertebrates and vertebrates to green crab predation. There were significant increases in the abundances of two polychaete taxa, Lumbr.
Optimal Elimination of Inconsistency in Expert Knowledge: Formulation of the Problem, Fast Algorithms

Ideally, if we encounter such an inconsistency, we would like to point out this contradiction to the experts and ask them to resolve it before we input the inconsistent data into the computer-based system. However, these inconsistencies reflect not internal inconsistencies of the expert’s reasoning, but rather (inevitable) differences between the expert’s internal reasoning and its formalized representation. As a result, experts themselves often cannot provide us with any meaningful guidance about the best way to resolve these inconsistencies. Our experience shows that, if faced with such an inconsistency, experts often make arbitrary changes in their original estimates, changes which are kind of “random” in the sense that in a similar situation the same expert can make a completely different adjustment. Since we cannot rely on experts to provide us with a meaningful and “consistent” way of eliminating inconsistency, we must therefore design automatic inconsistency-elimination tools and use them as a part of knowledge elicitation.
Gender differentiation at work: cultural capital and the conceptual articulation of structure and agency

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Adult learning experiences from an aquarium visit : the on-site and longitudinal roles of personal agendas and social interactions in family groups

The overall and long-lasting impact of learning science from informal situations and environments has been deeply recognised. Also, it has been acknowledged that expanding and deepening our understandings of the nature and dynamics of the learning process in the informal setting is crucial for the development and implementation of rich and enjoyable educational opportunities for all the audiences that visit such settings. This qualitative study investigates how and what the adult members of family groups learn in and from a visit to the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre, by examining the role of their personal agendas and their social interactions. Using on-site and follow-up openended, semi-structured interviews, as well as on-site observations, parents'/guardians' perceptions about their families' experience at the aquarium were analysed. Interpretive data analysis suggests that the adult members of family groups learn as a result of the visit to the aquarium, and that their learning is cognitive, social, and affective in nature. The contact with living creatures elicits emotional responses and connections with past experiences, and promotes cognitive and affective gains in adults, who also gain awareness and understandings about their family members as a result of the collective experience. Also, personal pre-defined and emerging agendas play a significant role in the learning experience at the individual and group levels, both during the visit and longitudinally. Parents/guardians bring mainly recreation, learning and social agendas to the aquarium setting. However, multiple forces influence the construction and continuous negotiation of such dynamic agendas, such as prior experiences, and intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In the long term, adults connect their experience at the aquarium with other relevant contexts such as the home and the work place, and show evidence of long term factual knowledge.
Asymptotic disturbance attenuation property analysis for discrete-time uncertain switched linear systems

In this paper, the disturbance attenuation properties in the sense of uniformly ultimate boundedness are investigated for a class of switched linear systems with parametric uncertainties and exterior disturbances. We aim to characterize the conditions under which the switched system can achieve a finite disturbance attenuation level. First, arbitrary switching signals are considered, and a necessary and sufficient condition is derived. Secondly, if the finite disturbance attenuation level is not preserved under arbitrary switchings, we restrict the switching signals so as to guarantee the finite disturbance attenuation levels. Two cases are considered here that depend on whether all the subsystems are uniformly ultimately bounded or not. For both cases, the switching signals are characterized by an average dwell time scheme. The techniques are based on multiple polyhedral Lyapunov and Lyapunov-like functions.
Factor V and Thrombotic Disease: Description of a Janus-Faced Protein

The generation of thrombin by the prothrombinase complex constitutes an essential step in hemostasis, with thrombin being crucial for the amplification of blood coagulation, fibrin formation, and platelet activation. In the prothrombinase complex, the activated form of coagulation factor V (FVa) is an essential cofactor to the enzyme-activated factor X (FXa), FXa being virtually ineffective in the absence of its cofactor. Besides its procoagulant potential, intact factor V (FV) has an anticoagulant cofactor capacity functioning in synergy with protein S and activated protein C (APC) in APC-catalyzed inactivation of the activated form of factor VIII. The expression of anticoagulant cofactor function of FV is dependent on APC-mediated proteolysis of intact FV. Thus, FV has the potential to function in procoagulant and anticoagulant pathways, with its functional properties being modulated by proteolysis exerted by procoagulant and anticoagulant enzymes. The procoagulant enzymes factor Xa and thrombin are both able to activate circulating FV to FVa. The activity of FVa is, in turn, regulated by APC together with its cofactor protein S. In fact, the regulation of thrombin formation proceeds primarily through the upregulation and downregulation of FVa cofactor activity, and failure to control FVa activity may result in either bleeding or thrombotic complications. A prime example is APC resistance, which is the most common genetic risk factor for thrombosis. It is caused by a single point mutation in the FV gene (factor VLeiden) that not only renders FVa less susceptible to the proteolytic inactivation by APC but also impairs the anticoagulant properties of FV. This review gives a description of the dualistic character of FV and describes the gene-gene and gene-environment interactions that are important for the involvement of FV in the etiology of venous thromboembolism.
Visual analysis on online display advertising data

In recent years online display advertising has grown at a rapid pace. Genome from Yahoo! is the big data buying solution for online display advertising. The goal of our platform is to identify the best opportunity to display an ad to a user who is most likely to take a desired action. Our system contains websites which are visited by several million users per day. The number of attributes related to user events is also of the order of several thousand. Visual analysis has emerged as a powerful technique to facilitate demonstrating data, filtering extreme cases and outliers, exploiting data details, and identifying data analysis tasks. With respect to large-scale online data, the paper presents some use cases on visual analysis at Genome from Yahoo!
Proof-of-Concept, Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial of Bacillus-Calmette-Guerin for Treatment of Long-Term Type 1 Diabetes

Background No targeted immunotherapies reverse type 1 diabetes in humans. However, in a rodent model of type 1 diabetes, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) reverses disease by restoring insulin secretion. Specifically, it stimulates innate immunity by inducing the host to produce tumor necrosis factor (TNF), which, in turn, kills disease-causing autoimmune cells and restores pancreatic beta-cell function through regeneration. Methodology/Principal Findings Translating these findings to humans, we administered BCG, a generic vaccine, in a proof-of-principle, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of adults with long-term type 1 diabetes (mean: 15.3 years) at one clinical center in North America. Six subjects were randomly assigned to BCG or placebo and compared to self, healthy paired controls (n = 6) or reference subjects with (n = 57) or without (n = 16) type 1 diabetes, depending upon the outcome measure. We monitored weekly blood samples for 20 weeks for insulin-autoreactive T cells, regulatory T cells (Tregs), glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) and other autoantibodies, and C-peptide, a marker of insulin secretion. BCG-treated patients and one placebo-treated patient who, after enrollment, unexpectedly developed acute Epstein-Barr virus infection, a known TNF inducer, exclusively showed increases in dead insulin-autoreactive T cells and induction of Tregs. C-peptide levels (pmol/L) significantly rose transiently in two BCG-treated subjects (means: 3.49 pmol/L [95% CI 2.95–3.8], 2.57 [95% CI 1.65–3.49]) and the EBV-infected subject (3.16 [95% CI 2.54–3.69]) vs.1.65 [95% CI 1.55–3.2] in reference diabetic subjects. BCG-treated subjects each had more than 50% of their C-peptide values above the 95th percentile of the reference subjects. The EBV-infected subject had 18% of C-peptide values above this level. Conclusions/Significance We conclude that BCG treatment or EBV infection transiently modified the autoimmunity that underlies type 1 diabetes by stimulating the host innate immune response. This suggests that BCG or other stimulators of host innate immunity may have value in the treatment of long-term diabetes. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00607230