Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fruit flies and intellectual disability

Mental retardation - more commonly known nowadays as intellectual disability - is a severe neurological condition affecting 3% of the general population. As a result of analysis of familial cases and recent advances in clinical genetic testing great strides have been made in our understanding of the genetic etiologies of mental retardation. Nonetheless, no treatment is currently clinically available to patients suffering from intellectual disability. Several animal models have been used in the study of memory and cognition. Established paradigms in Drosophila have recently captured cognitive defects in fly mutants for orthologs of genes involved in human intellectual disability. We review here three protocols designed to understand the molecular genetic basis of learning and memory in Drosophila and the genes identified so far with relation to mental retardation. In addition, we explore the mental retardation genes for which evidence of neuronal dysfunction other than memory has been established in Drosophila. Finally, we summarize the findings in Drosophila for mental retardation genes for which no neuronal information is yet available. All in all, this review illustrates the impressive overlap between genes identified in human mental retardation and genes involved in physiological learning and memory.
Quality of Life and Explanatory Models in patients with Bipolar Affective Disorder

OBJECTIVES: 1. To assess Quality of life (QOL) & Explanatory Models (EM) of illness in Bipolar Affective Disorder patients (BPAD) 2. To assess relationship between QOL, EM and selected patient variables: age, gender, marital status, education, religion 3. To assess relationship between QOL, EM and selected disease variables: nature of first episode, presence of psychotic symptoms, duration of illness, number of episodes, rapid cycling, presence of comorbidities, family history of mental illness, medication cost and side effects, suicide attempts. METHODS: Consecutive out-patients with a diagnosis of affective disorder who meet eligibility criteria will be rated on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and Positive and Negative Symptom Scale. Beliefs about illness will be recorded using Short Explanatory Model Interview (SEMI) and quality of life will be recorded using the WHO Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF). Socio-demographic details will be recorded. Using SPSS for Windows (version 16.0.1), mean and standard deviation will be calculated for continuous variables and frequency distributions for categorical data. The chi square test and the Student’s t-test will be used to assess the significance of associations for categorical and continuous variables respectively. RESULTS: Quality of life was found to be poor in Bipolar Affective Disorder. Most patients held multiple and diverse explanatory models of illness causation. Quality of life was found to be associated with educational qualification, socioeconomic status and explanatory models held, as well as health seeking behavior.
No Downlink Pilots Are Needed in TDD Massive MIMO

We consider the Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output downlink with maximum-ratio and zero-forcing processing and time-division duplex operation. To decode, the users must know their instantaneous effective channel gain. Conventionally, it is assumed that by virtue of channel hardening, this instantaneous gain is close to its average and hence that users can rely on knowledge of that average (also known as statistical channel information). However, in some propagation environments, such as keyhole channels, channel hardening does not hold. We propose a blind algorithm to estimate the effective channel gain at each user, that does not require any downlink pilots. We derive a capacity lower bound of each user for our proposed scheme, applicable to any propagation channel. Compared with the case of no downlink pilots (relying on channel hardening), and compared with training-based estimation using downlink pilots, our blind algorithm performs significantly better. The difference is especially pronounced in environments that do not offer channel hardening.
Mapping synergies from human to robotic hands with dissimilar kinematics: an object based approach

Robotic hands differ in kinematics, dynamics, programming, control and sensing frameworks. Their common character is redundancy, which undoubtedly represents a key feature for dexterity and flexibility, but it is also a drawback for integrated automation since it typically requires additional efforts to seamlessly integrate devices, particularly robotic hands, in industrial scenario. This paper focuses on the mapping between hands with dissimilar kinematics. It is based on the argument that the reflected optimality of the pattern of grasping forces emerging from human hand synergies should be matched, in some sense, by the sought for postural synergies of robotic hands. As a natural consequence of the proposed approach, postural synergies for different kinematic structures could look entirely different in geometric shape. This difference should be a consequence of aspects such as different dimensions, kinematic structures, number of fingers, compliance, contact properties which cannot come into play if a gross geometric mapping is applied. The proposed mapping is based on the use of a virtual sphere and will be mediated by a model of an anthropomorphic robotic hand able to capture the idea of synergies in human hands.
Programmed translational frameshifting

Errors that alter the reading frame occur extremely rarely during translation, yet some genes have evolved sequences that efficiently induce frameshifting. These sequences, termed programmed frameshift sites, manipulate the translational apparatus to promote non-canonical decoding. Frameshifts are mechanistically diverse. Most cause a -1 shift of frames; the first such site was discovered in a metazoan retrovirus, but they are now known to be dispersed quite widely among evolutionarily diverse species. +1 frameshift sites are much less common, but again dispersed widely. The rarest form are the translational hop sites which program the ribosome to bypass a region of several dozen nucleotides. Each of these types of events are stimulated by distinct mechanisms. All of the events share a common phenomenology in which the programmed frameshift site causes the ribosome to pause during elongation so that the kinetically unfavorable alternative decoding event can occur. During this pause most frameshifts occur because one or more ribosome-bound tRNAs slip between cognate or near-cognate codons. However, even this generalization is not entirely consistent, since some frameshifts occur without slippage. Because of their similarity to rarer translational errors, programmed frameshift sites provide a tool with which to probe the mechanism of frame maintenance.
The Present Value Model of Us Stock Prices Redux: A New Testing Strategy and Some Evidence

Relying on a present value model with time-varying expected returns, and incorporating a quite general class of processes to model bubble like stock price deviations from the long-run equilibrium, we provide empirical evidence on the US log dividend-price ratio over the 1871:1 - 2001:9 period, as well as for several sub-periods. The application of a momentum threshold autoregressive technique designed to detect asymmetric short-run adjustments to the long-run equilibrium provides empirical support in favor of the long-run validity of the present value model. Nevertheless, in the short-run, US stock prices exhibit large and persistent bubble like departures from present value prices followed by a crash.
Recognition of Cognates and Interlingual Homographs: The Neglected Role of Phonology

Abstract In two experiments Dutch–English bilinguals were tested with English words varying in their degree of orthographic, phonological, and semantic overlap with Dutch words. Thus, an English word target could be spelled the same as a Dutch word and/or could be a near-homophone of a Dutch word. Whether such form similarity was accompanied with semantic identity (translation equivalence) was also varied. In a progressive demasking task and a visual lexical decision task very similar results were obtained. Both tasks showed facilitatory effects of cross-linguistic orthographic and semantic similarity on response latencies to target words, but inhibitory effects of phonological overlap. A third control experiment involving English lexical decision with monolinguals indicated that these results were not due to specific characteristics of the stimulus material. The results are interpreted within an interactive activation model for monolingual and bilingual word recognition (the Bilingual Interactive Activation model) expanded with a phonological and a semantic component.
Towards Opportunistic Data Dissemination in Mobile Phone Sensor Networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest within the research community in developing opportunistic routing protocols. Many schemes have been proposed; however, they differ greatly in assumptions and in type of network for which they are evaluated. As a result, researchers have an ambiguous understanding of how these schemes compare against each other in their specific applications. To investigate the performance of existing opportunistic routing algorithms in realistic scenarios, we propose a heterogeneous architecture including fixed infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, and mobile nodes. The proposed architecture focuses on how to utilize the available, low cost short-range radios of mobile phones for data gathering and dissemination. We also propose a new realistic mobility model and metrics. Existing opportunistic routing protocols are simulated and evaluated with the proposed heterogeneous architecture, mobility models, and transmission interfaces. Results show that some protocols suffer long time-to-live (TTL), while others suffer short TTL. We show that heterogeneous sensor network architectures need heterogeneous routing algorithms, such as a combination of Epidemic and Spray and Wait.
Feedback-aided selective subspace retransmission for outage-free spatial multiplexing

We study a novel spatial multiplexing scheme for a multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) architecture with vertical coding and a feedback channel. Rather than for sending back channel state information (CSI), the feedback channel is used to request the retransmission of signal parts in critical signal subspaces. This enables the receiver to perform linear reconstruction of the layered signals without the destructive noise enhancement in ill-conditioned channel matrices that is experienced with conventional linear processors. Moreover, a given target signal-to-noise ratio at the decoder input can be ensured. A comparison against standard MIMO architectures in terms of achievable throughput lets us conclude that the proposed multiplexing facilitates an advantageous closed-loop MIMO system which does not rely on accurate transmitter-side CSI.
Null energy condition violations in eternal inflation

The usual scenario of ``eternal inflation'' involves an approximately de Sitter spacetime undergoing upward fluctuations of the local expansion rate $H$. This spacetime requires frequent violations of the Null Energy Condition (NEC). We investigate the fluctuations of the energy-momentum tensor of the scalar field in de Sitter space as a possible source of such violations. We find that fluctuations of the energy-momentum tensor smeared in space and time are well-defined and may provide the NEC violations. Our results for slow-roll inflation are consistent with the standard calculations of inflationary density fluctuations. In the diffusive regime where quantum fluctuations dominate the slow-roll evolution, the magnitude of smeared energy-momentum tensor fluctuations is large enough to create frequent NEC violations.
Speciation Has a Spatial Scale That Depends on Levels of Gene Flow

Area is generally assumed to affect speciation rates, but work on the spatial context of speciation has focused mostly on patterns of range overlap between emerging species rather than on questions of geographical scale. A variety of geographical theories of speciation predict that the probability of speciation occurring within a given region should (1) increase with the size of the region and (2) increase as the spatial extent of intraspecific gene flow becomes smaller. Using a survey of speciation events on isolated oceanic islands for a broad range of taxa, we find evidence for both predictions. The probability of in situ speciation scales with island area in bats, carnivorous mammals, birds, flowering plants, lizards, butterflies and moths, and snails. Ferns are an exception to these findings, but they exhibit high frequencies of polyploid and hybrid speciation, which are expected to be scale independent. Furthermore, the minimum island size for speciation correlates across groups with the strength of intraspecific gene flow, as is estimated from a meta‐analysis of published population genetic studies. These results indicate a general geographical model of speciation rates that are dependent on both area and gene flow. The spatial scale of population divergence is an important but neglected determinant of broad‐scale diversity patterns.
Stopping Cooling Flows with Jets

We describe two-dimensional gasdynamical models of jets that carry mass as well as energy to the hot gas in galaxy clusters. These flows have many attractive attributes for solving the galaxy cluster cooling flow problem: why the hot gas temperature and density profiles resemble cooling flows but show no spectral evidence of cooling to low temperatures. Using an approximate model for the cluster A1795, we show that mass-carrying jets can reduce the overall cooling rate to or below the low values implied by X-ray spectra. Biconical subrelativistic jets, described by several ad hoc parameters, are assumed to be activated when gas flows toward or cools near a central supermassive black hole. As the jets proceed out from the center, they entrain more and more ambient gas. The jets lose internal pressure by expansion and are compressed by the ambient cluster gas, becoming rather difficult to observe. For a wide variety of initial jet parameters and several feedback scenarios, the global cooling can be suppressed for many gigayears while maintaining cluster temperature profiles similar to those observed. The intermittency of the feedback generates multiple generations of X-ray cavities similar to those observed in the Perseus Cluster and elsewhere.
High-speed compact circuits with CMOS

Characteristics of various CMOS and NMOS circuit techniques are described, along with the shortcomings of each. Then a new circuit type, the CMOS domino circuit is described. This involves the connection of dynamic CMOS gates in such a way that a single clock edge can be used to turn on all gates in the circuit at once. As a result, complex clocking schemes are not needed and the full inherent speed of the dynamic gate can be utilized. The circuit is most valuable where gates are complex and have high fan-out such as in arithmetic units. Examples are shown of the use of domino circuits in an 8-bit ALU, where simulations indicate a speed advantage of 1.5 to 2 over traditional circuits, and in a 32-bit ALU where a worst case add in 124 ns was projected and a time less than 100 ns was achieved.
The Political Speech Corpus of Bulgarian

The paper introduces the Political Speech Corpus of Bulgarian. First, its current state has been discussed with respect to its size, coverage, genre specification and related online services. Then, the focus goes to the annotation details. On the one hand, the layers of linguistic annotation are presented. On the other hand, the compatibility with CLARIN technical Infrastructure is explained. Also, some user-based scenarios are mentioned to demonstrate the corpus services and applicability.
Acute superior oblique palsy in monkeys: III. Relationship to Listing's Law.

PURPOSE To investigate the three-dimensional orientation of the eye and its relationship to Listing's Law in monkeys with acute acquired superior oblique palsy (SOP). METHODS The trochlear nerve was severed intracranially in two rhesus monkeys. Three-axis eye movements (horizontal, vertical, and torsion) were measured with binocular, dual search coils during fixation of targets in a 40 degrees x 40 degrees grid. Rotation vectors were calculated, and Listing's plane (LP) was determined by a least-squares planar fit of eye torsion as a function of horizontal and vertical position. RESULTS The main findings were: (1) In the paretic eye, there was an immediate and sustained rotation of the orientation plane by approximately 25 degrees in the temporal direction; (2) the thickness of LP, defined as the torsional standard deviation (SD), increased little (by 0.13 degrees in M1 and 0.08 degrees in M2) after SOP, and (3) the SD of intrasaccadic torsion was slightly greater than that during fixation, but there was no change after SOP. CONCLUSIONS Acute SOP in rhesus monkeys leads to a temporal rotation of LP. This is consistent with a relatively increased extorsion in down gaze due to a loss of normal intorsion by the superior oblique muscle. The SD of torsion increased by only a small amount, implying that the validity of Listing's Law is not affected much by complete SOP, despite the large change in the orientation of LP.
Protein Data Modelling for Concurrent Sequential Patterns

Protein sequences from the same family typically share common patterns which imply their structural function and biological relationship. The challenge of identifying protein motifs is often addressed through mining frequent item sets and sequential patterns, where post-processing is a useful technique. Earlier work has shown that Concurrent Sequential Patterns mining can be applied in bioinformatics, e.g. to detect frequently occurring concurrent protein sub-sequences. This paper presents a companion approach to data modelling and visualisation, applying it to real-world protein datasets from the PROSITE and NCBI databases. The results show the potential for graph-based modelling in representing the integration of higher level patterns common to all or nearly all of the protein sequences.
The Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS): Pathophysiology, Diagnosis & Management

Postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS), characterized by orthostatic tachycardia in the absence of orthostatic hypotension, has been the focus of increasing clinical interest over the last 15 years 1. Patients with POTS complain of symptoms of tachycardia, exercise intolerance, lightheadedness, extreme fatigue, headache and mental clouding. Patients with POTS demonstrate a heart rate increase of ≥30 bpm with prolonged standing (5-30 minutes), often have high levels of upright plasma norepinephrine (reflecting sympathetic nervous system activation), and many patients have a low blood volume. POTS can be associated with a high degree of functional disability. Therapies aimed at correcting the hypovolemia and the autonomic imbalance may help relieve the severity of the symptoms. This review outlines the present understanding of the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management of POTS.
A distal intergenic region controls pancreatic endocrine differentiation by acting as a transcriptional enhancer and as a polycomb response element

Lineage-selective expression of developmental genes is dependent on the interplay between activating and repressive mechanisms. Gene activation is dependent on cell-specific transcription factors that recognize transcriptional enhancer sequences. Gene repression often depends on the recruitment of Polycomb group (PcG) proteins, although the sequences that underlie the recruitment of PcG proteins, also known as Polycomb response elements (PREs), remain poorly understood in vertebrates. While distal PREs have been identified in mammals, a role for positive-acting enhancers in PcG-mediated repression has not been described. Here we have used a highly efficient procedure based on lentiviral-mediated transgenesis to carry out in vivo fine-mapping of, cis-regulatory sequences that control lineage-specific activation of Neurog3, a master regulator of pancreatic endocrine differentiation. Our findings reveal an enhancer region that is sufficient to drive correct spacio-temporal expression of Neurog3 and demonstrate that this same region serves as a PRE in alternative lineages where Neurog3 is inactive.
Smart Health and Wellbeing

Healthcare informatics has drawn substantial attention in recent years. Current work on healthcare informatics is highly interdisciplinary involving methodologies from computing, engineering, information science, behavior science, management science, social science, as well as many different areas in medicine and public health. Three major tracks, (i) systems, (ii) analytics, and (iii) human factors, can be identified. The systems track focuses on healthcare system architecture, framework, design, engineering, and application; the analytics track emphasizes data/information processing, retrieval, mining, analytics, as well as knowledge discovery; the human factors track targets the understanding of users or context, interface design, and user studies of healthcare applications. In this article, we discuss some of the latest development and introduce several articles selected for this special issue. We envision that the development of computing-oriented healthcare informatics research will continue to grow rapidly. The integration of different disciplines to advance the healthcare and wellbeing of our society will also be accelerated.
A universal PNML Tool

The PNML(Petri Net Markup Language) is an interchange format for Petri nets, which is currently being standadized. PNML is not restricted to a particular kind or version of Petri net, but can be used for every Petri net type. To this end, PNML allows the definition of new Petri net types. The definition of PNML makes use of Model-based Software Engineering technology, and there is an implementation of PNML based on EMF, which is called the PNML Framework. The PNML Framwork, however, needs to be recompiled whenever a new Petri net type is defined, and it provides an API only. It does not come with a graphical editor. In this thesis, a universal PNML tool is developed in which new Petri net types can be plugged in without recompiling the tool for every new type. Moreover, the universal PNML tool should come with a graphical editor that allows to create and edit Petri nets of any (plugged-in) type. Furthermore, the universal PNML tool should be able to interact with applications running on that Petri net, and to allow the applications to visualize the results in the graphical editor. For some features of new Petri net types, there are specific graphical representations. In order to allow the universal PNML tool to represent these features in this way, the type concept of PNML types needs to be enhanced with a concept for defining the graphical appearance of some features of a new Petri net type. The concepts for defining these appearances should be designed in this thesis and implemented in the universal PNML tool.