Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fetal Stem Cells and Skeletal Muscle Regeneration: A Therapeutic Approach

More than 40% of the body mass is represented by muscle tissue, which possesses the innate ability to regenerate after damage through the activation of muscle-specific stem cells, namely satellite cells. Muscle diseases, in particular chronic degenerative states of skeletal muscle such as dystrophies, lead to a perturbation of the regenerative process, which causes the premature exhaustion of satellite cell reservoir due to continuous cycles of degeneration/regeneration. Nowadays, the research is focused on different therapeutic approaches, ranging from gene and cell to pharmacological therapy, but still there is no definitive cure in particular for genetic muscle disease. Keeping this in mind, in this article, we will give special consideration to muscle diseases and the use of fetal derived stem cells as a new approach for therapy. Cells of fetal origin, from cord blood to placenta and amniotic fluid, can be easily obtained without ethical concern, expanded and differentiated in culture, and possess immune-modulatory properties. The in vivo approach in animal models can be helpful to study the mechanism underneath the operating principle of the stem cell reservoir, namely the niche, which holds great potential to understand the onset of muscle pathologies.
CGE Modeling for Regional Economic Development Analysis

Despite their long-standing use in economic policy analysis generally, and increasing popularity in regional policy analysis, CGE models have yet to become the dominant approach for analysis of regional economic development policies. This review discusses the likely reasons for the limited use of CGE models for regional economic development analysis, particularly for small regions. The paper also proposes methodological improvements that would likely lead to wider use of CGE models in economic development practice. A central theme is the need for a model that can be empirically-demonstrated to capture the relevant policy components and the structure of the region of study.
Development of UWB antenna array for hyperthermia treatment

An antipodal Vivaldi antenna is developed for hyperthermia treatment of brain tumor. The proposed antenna has overall size 82×94×1.6mm. The return loss parameter is less -10 dB starting from 0.1 GHz, range, when immersed in brain simulating liquid. The paper presents optimization of array structure to focus energy in the intended tumor location. Results indicate that the presented structure is promising in developing microwave imaging systems.
Making Robotic Marionettes Perform

This paper describes a project with the long term goal of automated performance marionettes, accomplished by capturing human motion and automating the motion imitation synthesis for an experimental marionette system. The automation and performance goals required the development of hardware and software tools that enable motion imitation, leading to a series of results in numerical simulation, optimal control, and embedded systems. Marionettes are actuated by strings, so the mechanical description of the marionettes either creates a multi-scale or degenerate system—making simulation of the constrained dynamics challenging. Moreover, the marionettes have 40-50 degrees of freedom with closed kinematic chains. Choreography requires the use of motion primitives, typically originating from human motions that one wants the marionette to imitate, and resulting in a high dimensional nonlinear optimal control problem that needs to be solved for each primitive. Once acquired, the motion primitives must be pieced together in a way that preserves stability, resulting in an optimal timing control problem. We conclude with our current results that enable the synthesis of optimal imitation trajectories, and overview the next steps we are taking in this project towards automated performance marionettes.
Caffeine Abolishes the Ultraviolet-Induced REV3 Translesion Replication Pathway in Mouse Cells

When a replicative DNA polymerase stalls upon encountering a photoproduct on the template strand, it is relieved by other low-processivity polymerase(s), which insert nucleotide(s) opposite the lesion. Using an alkaline sucrose density gradient sedimentation technique, we previously classified this process termed UV-induced translesion replication (UV-TLS) into two types. In human cancer cells or xeroderma pigmentosum variant (XP-V) cells, UV-TLS was inhibited by caffeine or proteasome inhibitors. However, in normal human cells, the process was insensitive to these reagents. Reportedly, in yeast or mammalian cells, REV3 protein (a catalytic subunit of DNA polymerase ζ) is predominantly involved in the former type of TLS. Here, we studied UV-TLS in fibroblasts derived from the Rev3-knockout mouse embryo (Rev3KO-MEF). In the wild-type MEF, UV-TLS was slow (similar to that of human cancer cells or XP-V cells), and was abolished by caffeine or MG-262. In 2 cell lines of Rev3KO-MEF (Rev3−/− p53−/−), UV-TLS was not observed. In p53KO-MEF, which is a strict control for Rev3KO-MEF, the UV-TLS response was similar to that of the wild-type. Introduction of the Rev3 expression plasmid into Rev3KO-MEF restored the UV-TLS response in selected stable transformants. In some transformants, viability to UV was the same as that in the wild-type, and the death rate was increased by caffeine. Our findings indicate that REV3 is predominantly involved in UV-TLS in mouse cells, and that the REV3 translesion pathway is suppressed by caffeine or proteasome inhibitors.
Automated capsulorhexis based on a hybrid magnetic-mechanical actuation system

This paper presents a hybrid magnetic-mechanical manipulation system for automated capsulorhexis utilizing a flexible catheter with a sharp edge magnetic tip. Vision based closed loop control is implemented to guide the tip on a circular path in the anterior eye segment. A continuous motion with high repeatability is achieved. The system shows the first catheter-based application of the electromagnetic manipulation system, OctoMag, for fast and safe ophthalmic surgery that potentially reduces the risk of complications and improves precision.
Transit of epidermal growth factor through coated pits of the Golgi system

Using the direct conjugate of epidermal growth factor (EGF) and horseradish peroxidase, we have followed the entry of EGF into KB (human carcinoma) cells. EGF initially was found bound diffusely to the entire cell surface at 4 degrees C; on warming to 37 degrees C, EGF was found clustered in clathrin-coated pits on the plasma membrane in 1 min or less. Within 1-2 min at 37 degrees C, EGF began to accumulate in receptosomes within the cell and remained there for up to 10 min. At 10- 13 min after warming to 37 degrees C, EGF was found in thin reticular membranous elements of the Golgi system, as well as concentrated in the clathrin-coated pits present on these membranes. By 15 min after warming, EGF began to be delivered to lysosomes located near the Golgi system. These findings suggest that clathrin-coated pits in the Golgi reticular system accumulate EGF before delivery to lysosomes.
Bullying and Gender. Prevention from School Organization

Homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and gender violence in sexual-affective relationships appear frequently in the bases of bullying. The educational centres are more conscious about this reality and look for actions to prevent and eradicate this kind of violence. At the same time, international research states that bullying prevention needs a re-organization of the educational centre incorporating the work of all the educational community (students, family, teachers, etc.). In this article we gather data on bullying and its connection to gender, part of the Spanish legislation related to this problem is analysed and we conducted an international literature review. The main contribution of this article is to present orientations and actions that prevent and contribute to eradicate gender violence and violence for homophobia, biphobia and transphobia through the school organization and school management. Some of these actions are inclusive education, democratization of the centres, making visible and not trivializing violence, and mainly the community participation and active positioning of all the community against bullying and in favour of the victims.
AGIOS: Application-Guided I/O Scheduling for Parallel File Systems

In this paper, we improve the performance of server-side I/O scheduling on parallel file systems by transparently including information about the applications' access patterns. Server-side I/O scheduling is a valuable tool on multiapplication scenarios, where the applications' spatial locality suffers from interference caused by concurrent accesses to the file system. We present AGIOS, an I/O scheduling library for parallel file systems. We guide scheduler's decisions by including information about the applications' future requests. This information is obtained from traces generated by the scheduler itself, without changes in application or file system. Our approach shows performance improvements under different workloads of 46.3% on average when compared to a scenario without an I/O scheduler, and of 25.1% when compared to a scheduler which does not use information about future accesses.
An Integrated Development Model for Character-Based Games

Character-based games are strongly dependent on the quality of their Non Player Characters’ behavior. Developing games of this nature usually requires a high investment of time and money on Artificial Intelligence techniques, in order to provide better credibility to the characters. For the independent game developers’ community, affording this kind of extra complexity may be highly expensive. Therefore, this article proposes a way of developing character-based games while maintaining high quality and low-cost. This is done by using a modular Artificial Intelligence technique called Rule-Based Systems, integrated with a game development support tool, XNA. Since Java is better provided with Rule-based System tools, the IKVM application is used to allow this integration. All mechanisms and tools used are free. A comparison of free Rule-based Systems is presented, as well as an application of the proposed model on a real game project.
Uniform hypothesis testing for finite-valued stationary processes

Given a discrete-valued sample X1, …, Xn, we wish to decide whether it was generated by a distribution belonging to a family H0, or it was generated by a distribution belonging to a family H1. In this work, we assume that all distributions are stationary ergodic, and do not make any further assumptions (e.g. no independence or mixing rate assumptions). We would like to have a test whose probability of error (both Types I and II) is uniformly bounded. More precisely, we require that for each ϵ there exists a sample size n such that probability of error is upper-bounded by ϵ for samples longer than n. We find some necessary and some sufficient conditions on H0 and H1 under which a consistent test (with this notion of consistency) exists. These conditions are topological, with respect to the topology of distributional distance.
EFFICIENT NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR AUTHENTICATION IN MOBILE AND PREVALENT COMPUTING

In now a days, so many applications depend on the existence of the small devices that can exchange information and form communication networks. In a significant portion of such applications, the confidentiality and integrity of the communicated messages are very important. In this work we propose a method and system for authenticating messages is provided. A message authentication system generates random string and that will be sent to the recipient’s mobile and message sent to the recipient via mail at the other side the receiver got the message through the mail and that will be in encrypted form and the recipient will decrypt the message with key that is sent to his mobile. The message authentication system then determines whether the regenerated message matches the original message. If the codes match, then the integrity and authenticity of the message are verified.
Power-aware broadcasting and activity scheduling in ad hoc wireless networks using connected dominating sets

In ad hoc mobile wireless networks, owing to host mobility, broadcasting is expected to be more frequently used to find a route to a particular host, to page a host, and to alarm all hosts. A straightforward broadcasting by flooding is usually very costly and will result in substantial redundancy and more energy consumption. Power consumption is an important issue since most mobile hosts operate on battery. Broadcasting based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where only nodes in the dominating set need to relay the broadcast packet. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the system are either in the set or are neighbors of nodes in the set. Wu and Li proposed a simple and efficient distributed algorithm for calculating connected dominating set in ad hoc wireless networks, where connections of nodes are determined by their geographical distances. In general, nodes in the connected dominating set consume more energy to handle various bypass traffic than nodes outside the set. To prolong the life span of each node and, hence, the network by balancing the energy consumption in the system, nodes should be alternately chosen to form a connected dominating set. Activity scheduling deals with the way of rotating the role of each node among a set of given operation modes (e.g. dominating nodes versus dominated nodes). In this paper, we propose to apply the notion of power-aware connected dominating set to broadcasting and activity scheduling. The effectiveness of the proposed method in prolonging the life span of the network is confirmed through simulation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Measuring and Modeling the Effect of Surface Moisture on the Spectral Reflectance of Coastal Beach Sand

Surface moisture is an important supply limiting factor for aeolian sand transport, which is the primary driver of coastal dune development. As such, it is critical to account for the control of surface moisture on available sand for dune building. Optical remote sensing has the potential to measure surface moisture at a high spatio-temporal resolution. It is based on the principle that wet sand appears darker than dry sand: it is less reflective. The goals of this study are (1) to measure and model reflectance under controlled laboratory conditions as function of wavelength () and surface moisture () over the optical domain of 350–2500 nm, and (2) to explore the implications of our laboratory findings for accurately mapping the distribution of surface moisture under natural conditions. A laboratory spectroscopy experiment was conducted to measure spectral reflectance (1 nm interval) under different surface moisture conditions using beach sand. A non-linear increase of reflectance upon drying was observed over the full range of wavelengths. Two models were developed and tested. The first model is grounded in optics and describes the proportional contribution of scattering and absorption of light by pore water in an unsaturated sand matrix. The second model is grounded in soil physics and links the hydraulic behaviour of pore water in an unsaturated sand matrix to its optical properties. The optical model performed well for volumetric moisture content 24% ( 0.97), but underestimated reflectance for between 24–30% ( 0.92), most notable around the 1940 nm water absorption peak. The soil-physical model performed very well ( 0.99) but is limited to 4% 24%. Results from a field experiment show that a short-wave infrared terrestrial laser scanner ( = 1550 nm) can accurately relate surface moisture to reflectance (standard error 2.6%), demonstrating its potential to derive spatially extensive surface moisture maps of a natural coastal beach.
TMW - a new method for lossless image compression

We present a general purpose lossless greyscale image compression method TMW that is based on the use of linear predictors and implicit seg mentation In order to achieve competitive com pression the compression process is split into an analysis step and a coding step In the rst step a set of linear predictors and other parameters suitable for the image is calculated which is in cluded in the compressed le and subsequently used for the coding step This adaption allows TMW to perform well over a very wide range of im age types Other signi cant features of TMW are the use of a one parameter probability distribu tion probability calculations based on unquantized prediction values blending of multiple probability distributions instead of prediction values and im plicit image segmentation The method has applications beyond image com pression The work is also relevant to image seg mentation and image comparison For image compression the method has been compared to CALIC on a selection of test images and typically outperforms it by between and percent at the cost of considerably slower com pression In particular a bitrate of less than bpp has been achieved for the luminance band of the well known lenna image compared to bpp reported for CALIC in Wu
Do Not Feel The Trolls

The passage from a read-only to a read-write Web gave people the possibility to freely interact, share and collaborate through social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The democracy of the Web is what made it so popular in the past decades but such a high degree of freedom of expression also gave birth to negative side eﬀects – the so called ‘dark side’ of the Web. An example of this is trolling, i.e., the exploitation of the anonymity of the Web to post inﬂammatory and outrageous messages directed to one speciﬁc person or community to provoke them into a desired emotional response. Online community masters usually warn users against trolls with messages such as DNFTT (Do Not Feed The Trolls) but so far this has not been enough to stop trolls trolling. The aim of this work is to use sentic computing, a new paradigm for the aﬀective analysis of natural language text, to detect trolls and hence prevent web-users from being emotionally hurt by malicious posts.
Voting on a Library Bond Issue: Two Elections in Akron, Ohio, 1961 and 1962

AT THE November 7, 1961, general election, the voters of Akron, Ohio, rejected a proposed $3,000,000 bond issue for a new central public library building. At the May 8 primary election the following year they approved, by a narrow margin, an identical proposal. This paper attempts to analyze the voting patterns in these two elections in an effort to discover ways in which voting on the two referendums can be correlated with socioeconomic data about the city, and further to suggest ways in which similar analyses might be helpful in other cities as an aid in planning a bond-issue campaign. A bond-issue referendum is a peculiarly isolated phenomenon because it puts a policy decision squarely on the individual voter. Most other decisions affecting libraries are made administratively or legislatively and are open to all kinds of modification and compromise as they develop. Once a bond issue is on the ballot it remains constant and is either approved or disapproved in accordance with the action the electorate takes on the proposal. A bond-issue election provides a possibility for a direct check by the people of the actions of library boards, one of the few ways they have of doing so. Yet, it appears that the electorate, at least in larger cities, rarely uses that check in a decisive fashion. Library bond issues ordinarily either win or lose by a close margin and, if they fail, are the victims more of apathy than opposition. There is already in existence a considerable amount of recorded experience that can aid a library in planning, developing, and executing a campaign. Most of this is of a reportorial nature and does not permit much generalization. The emphasis is almost always on the techniques used in promoting the bond issue. What is missing is any theoretical framework within which it is possible to compare campaigns and election results so as to find basic determinants of success and failure which could guide referendum sponsors to a better understanding of how to direct campaign efforts. Some research on library referendums has been done, but too little data 1 The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Illinois State Library.
Eosinophilia: secondary, clonal and idiopathic

Blood eosinophilia signifies either a cytokine‐mediated reactive phenomenon (secondary) or an integral phenotype of an underlying haematological neoplasm (primary). Secondary eosinophilia is usually associated with parasitosis in Third World countries and allergic conditions in the West. Primary eosinophilia is operationally classified as being clonal or idiopathic, depending on the respective presence or absence of a molecular, cytogenetic or histological evidence for a myeloid malignancy. The current communication features a comprehensive clinical summary of both secondary and primary eosinophilic disorders with emphasis on recent developments in molecular pathogenesis and treatment.
Experimental comparison of nonlinear motion control methods for a variable stiffness actuator

Variable compliant actuators play a key role in the development of efficient biomechatronic systems since energy can be stored in the compliant element thus leading to consumption reduction. In this paper, experimental results comparing passivity-based control (PBC) and feedback linearization (FL) for motion control of an actuator with variable torsional stiffness (VTS) aiming at applications like prosthetic knee joints are presented. The concept of VTS and the experimental setup are described and a mathematical model of the latter one is derived. Based on this, a control architecture consisting of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the velocities, a friction compensation as well as the mentioned controller types is developed. Both control methods are analyzed in terms of accuracy, dynamics and their control torque. FL and PBC lead to a stable control with high performance whereas the robustness is low by reason of the model-based control design. FL is superior to the PBC in terms of accuracy and control torque, which is mainly due to the high sensitivity of PBC regarding the discrete position signals. In addition, it is shown that FL can be applied for stable operation near the second natural frequency for different stiffness values.
Standing in the Gap: Theory and Practice Impacting Educational Opportunity and Achievement Gaps

This case study is the first known employing flow in educational administration in the United States. Using Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory and Dantley’s purpose-driven leadership, an administrator’s practices were examined with respect to two guiding questions: (a) is purposefulness integral to closing extant gaps in achievement, and (b) are the elements of flow found in successful educational administration? The recorded interview was subjected to template analysis developed from tenets of both theories. The results are that all nine elements of flow were found, as were the tenets of purpose-driven leadership in the work experience of an administrator’s success in closing the district’s achievement gap.