Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BRAID: stream mining through group lag correlations

The goal is to monitor multiple numerical streams, and determine which pairs are correlated with lags, as well as the value of each such lag. Lag correlations (and anti-correlations) are frequent, and very interesting in practice: For example, a decrease in interest rates typically precedes an increase in house sales by a few months; higher amounts of fluoride in the drinking water may lead to fewer dental cavities, some years later. Additional settings include network analysis, sensor monitoring, financial data analysis, and moving object tracking. Such data streams are often correlated (or anti-correlated), but with an unknown lag.We propose BRAID, a method to detect lag correlations between data streams. BRAID can handle data streams of semi-infinite length, incrementally, quickly, and with small resource consumption. We also provide a theoretical analysis, which, based on Nyquist's sampling theorem, shows that BRAID can estimate lag correlations with little, and often with no error at all. Our experiments on real and realistic data show that BRAID detects the correct lag perfectly most of the time (the largest relative error was about 1%); while it is up to 40,000 times faster than the naive implementation.
Evaluating a Measure of Student Effectiveness in an Undergraduate Psychology Program

This study evaluates the utility of a measure of student knowledge in various areas of psychology. The 40-item measure is a revision of a pilot test from last year, and was distributed to 90 undergraduate psychology students at a Midwestern university. The average score on the assessment was 19.87 (SD = 6.20), or 49.68%. Future directions for the assessment include validation by professors, leading to the revision and removal of items. An additional suggestion is increased enforcement in regard to student participation: The study’s 90-student sample was obtained after omitting 173 students who did not finish the exam, did not consent, or finished in an amount of time deemed impossible by the researchers. Evaluating a Measure of Student Effectiveness in an Undergraduate Psychology Program 4
Comparison of Postmortem Techniques for the Detection of Mycobacterium Bovis in White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus)

A retrospective study of various diagnostic postmortem techniques used in a 4-year surveillance program for detection of Mycobacterium bovis infection in wild white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) was conducted. The tests evaluated were routine histopathology, acid-fast staining, detection of acid-fast bacilli in culture, and an M. tuberculosis group-specific genetic probe applied to pure cultures. Each of these techniques were compared with a reference or “gold standard” of mycobacterial culture and identification. Histopathology, the most rapid form of testing for M. bovis infection in white-tailed deer samples, had a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 87%, resulting in a positive predictive value of 94%. The detection of acid-fast bacilli by staining was less sensitive than histopathology (90%), but its higher specificity (97%) resulted in a positive predictive value of 99%. The detection of acid-fast bacilli on culture was both highly specific (93%) and sensitive (100%). The group-specific genetic probe had the highest sensitivity and specificity and produced results in complete agreement with those of mycobacterial culture, suggesting that this technique could be used as the new “gold standard” for this particular wildlife tuberculosis surveillance program.
Krüppel-like Factor 11 Differentially Couples to Histone Acetyltransferase and Histone Methyltransferase Chromatin Remodeling Pathways to Transcriptionally Regulate Dopamine D2 Receptor in Neuronal Cells

Background: Chromatin-mediated events utilized by Krüppel-Like factors in neurons remain undefined. Results: Krüppel-Like factor 11 couples to antagonistic chromatin pathways (p300 versus heterochromatin protein 1) to regulate the dopamine D2 receptor gene. Conclusion: This is the first description of mechanisms underlying Krüppel-like factor-mediated functions in neurons. Significance: This knowledge expands our understanding of chromatin-mediated mechanisms that influence homeostasis in highly specialized cells. The importance of Krüppel-like factor (KLF)-mediated transcriptional pathways in the biochemistry of neuronal differentiation has been recognized relatively recently. Elegant studies have revealed that KLF proteins are important regulators of two major molecular and cellular processes critical for neuronal cell differentiation: neurite formation and the expression of neurotransmitter-related genes. However, whether KLF proteins mediate these key processes in a separate or coordinated fashion remains unknown. Moreover, knowledge on the contribution of chromatin dynamics to the biochemical mechanisms utilized by these proteins to perform their function is absent. Here we report the characterization of two antagonistic, chromatin-mediated mechanisms by which KLF11, also known as TIEG2 (transforming growth factor-β-inducible early gene 2) and MODY VII (maturity onset diabetes of the young VII), regulates transcription of the fopamine D2 receptor (Drd2) gene. First, KLF11 activates transcription by binding to a distinct Sp-KLF site within the Drd2 promoter (−98 to −94) and recruiting the p300 histone acetyltransferase. Second, Drd2 transcriptional activation is partially antagonized by heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1), the code reader for histone H3 lysine 9 methylation. Interestingly, KLF11 regulates neurotransmitter receptor gene expression in differentiating neuronal cell populations without affecting neurite formation. Overall, these studies highlight histone methylation and acetylation as key biochemical mechanisms modulating KLF-mediated neurotransmitter gene transcription. These data extend our knowledge of chromatin-mediated biochemical events that maintain key phenotypic features of differentiated neuronal cells.
Combinatorial Dichotomies in Set Theory

Abstract We give an overview of a research line concentrated on finding to which extent compactness fails at the level of first uncountable cardinal and to which extent it could be recovered on some other perhaps not so large cardinal. While this is of great interest to set theorists, one of the main motivations behind this line of research is in its applicability to other areas of mathematics. We give some details about this and we expose some possible directions for further research.
Chronic Treatment with a Broad Spectrum MMP Inhibitor, Doxycycline, Prevents the Development of Spontaneous Aortic Lesions in the Mouse Model of Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome

Aim: There is no proven therapy or prevention for vascular type of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (vEDS), a genetic disorder associated with mutation of pro-collagen type III and characterized by increased fragility of the vascular and hollow organ walls. Heterozygous COL3A1 -deficient mice (HT) recapitulate a mild presentation of one of the variants of vEDS, haploinsufficiency for collagen III. Adult HT are characterized by increased metalloproteinase (MMP) activity, reduced collagen content in the arterial walls, and spontaneous development of various severity lesions in aorta. We hypothesized that chronic treatment with MMP inhibitor would increase the collagen content and prevent the development of spontaneous aortic lesions. Methods and Results: Heterozygous COL3A1 -deficient mice (HT) were treated since weaning with broad spectrum MMP inhibitor, doxycycline, added to food. At the age of 9 months MMP-9 expression was twice as high in tunica media of aorta in untreated HT, while total collagen content was 30% lower (p<0.01) and cumulative score of aortic lesions was 8 times higher than in wild type mice WT (p<0.01). After 9 months of doxycycline treatment, MMP-9 activity, collagen content and lesions in aorta of HT were at the level of WT (p>0.05). Conclusion: In the mouse model of collagen III haploinsufficiency treatment with broad spectrum MMP inhibitor started early in life normalized increased MMP activity and reduced aortic collagen content in adult and prevented development of spontaneous aortic lesions. Findings provide experimental justification for clinical evaluation of benefit of doxycycline at least in haploinsufficient variety of vEDS patients.
The comparison of region growing algorithms with using EMST for point clouds

Close region interference is a problem in point cloud processing at the selection of local region step. Thus, growing local region with discarding the unwanted points is a crucial stage before post processing. Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) is widely used to overcome this problem. This study aims to investigate the utilization of EMST for three commonly used region growing algorithms k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), circular region growing (CRG) and hybrid connection table (HCT). The experiments are conducted on two different data sets that one represents close region interference while the other has varying thickness problems. The results are presented quantitatively by measuring similarity of the reconstructed curve with the original one and the algorithm runtime. Visual results are also presented. EMST usage is improving the accuracy of local region at close region interference while increasing algorithm run time. Consequently, HCT with or without EMST is the most preferable method.
Phase assignment algorithm based on traffic measurement for periodic VBR sources in ATM networks

This paper proposes a novel phase assignment algorithm "silent wave algorithm (SWA)" for periodic VBR traffic in ATM networks. Our algorithm decides when a new periodic VBR connection should begin to transmit based on its notification parameters and traffic measurement of going connections. Simulation results showed that it is difficult to accommodate pseudo periodic VBR traffic effectively without any phase allocation but the SWA can provide better QOS and improve the network utilization.
Large Deviations for Stochastic Processes

The notes are devoted to results on large deviations for sequences of Markov processes following closely the book by Feng and Kurtz ([FK06]). We outline how convergence of Fleming's nonlinear semigroups (logarithmically transformed nonlinear semigroups) implies large deviation principles analogous to the use of convergence of linear semigroups in weak convergence. The latter method is based on the range condition for the corresponding generator. Viscosity solution methods however provide applicable conditions for the necessary nonlinear semigroup convergence. Once having established the validity of the large deviation principle one is concerned to obtain more tractable representations for the corresponding rate function. This in turn can be achieved once a variational representation of the limiting generator of Fleming's semigroup can be established. The obtained variational representation of the generator allows for a suitable control representation of the rate function. The notes conclude with a couple of examples to show how the methodology via Fleming's semigroups works. These notes are based on the mini-course 'Large deviations for stochastic processes' the author held during the workshop 'Dynamical Gibs-non-Gibbs transitions' at EURANDOM in Eindhoven, December 2011, and at the Max-Planck institute for mathematics in the sciences in Leipzig, July 2012.
Effects of a single session of transcranial direct current stimulation on static balance in a patient with hemiparesis: a case study

[Purpose] Cerebrovascular accident (stroke) is characterized by an abrupt onset of focal or global neurological signs and symptoms. Asymmetry of the limbs is common following a stroke due to hemiplegia or hemiparesis. [Subject and Methods] A male patient having suffered an ischemic stroke was initially evaluated using the Timed Up-and-Go Test and the Six-Minute Walk Test. Static balance was evaluated using a force plate (Kistler model 9286BA) for the stabilometry analysis of center of pressure (COP) sway. The data were interpreted using the SWAY software program (BTS Engineering) synchronized with the SMART-D 140® system. Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS; 2 mA) was applied over the primary motor cortex for 20 minutes during gait training on a treadmill. [Results] Under the condition of eyes open, reductions were found in anteroposterior sway (6.18%), trace length (3.3%) and sway velocity (3.3%) immediately following tDCS. [Conclusion] A single session of anodal tDCS combined with treadmill training had a positive effect on the static balance of a subject with chronic hemiparesis stemming from a stroke.
A Common Docking Domain in Progesterone Receptor-B links DUSP6 and CK2 signaling to proliferative transcriptional programs in breast cancer cells

Progesterone receptors (PR) are transcription factors relevant to breast cancer biology. Herein, we describe an N-terminal common docking (CD) domain in PR-B, a motif first described in mitogen-activated protein kinases. Binding studies revealed PR-B interacts with dual-specificity phosphatase 6 (DUSP6) via the CD domain. Mutation of the PR-B CD domain (mCD) attenuated cell cycle progression and expression of PR-B target genes (including STAT5A and Wnt1); mCD PR-B failed to undergo phosphorylation on Ser81, a ck2-dependent site required for expression of these genes. PR-B Ser81 phosphorylation was dependent on binding with DUSP6 and required for recruitment of a transcriptional complex consisting of PR-B, DUSP6 and ck2 to an enhancer region upstream of the Wnt1 promoter. STAT5 was present at this site in the absence or presence of progestin. Furthermore, phospho-Ser81 PR-B was recruited to the STAT5A gene upon progestin treatment, suggestive of a feed-forward mechanism. Inhibition of JAK/STAT-signaling blocked progestin-induced STAT5A and Wnt1 expression. Our studies show that DUSP6 serves as a scaffold for ck2-dependent PR-B Ser81 phosphorylation and subsequent PR-B-specific gene selection in coordination with STAT5. Coregulation of select target genes by PR-B and STAT5 is likely a global mechanism required for growth promoting programs relevant to mammary stem cell biology and cancer.
High‐performance hybrid information service architecture

We introduce a distributed high‐performance Information Service Architecture, which forms a metadata replica hosting system to manage both highly dynamic small‐scale metadata and relatively large static metadata associated with Grid/Web Services. We present an empirical evaluation of the proposed architecture and investigate its practical usefulness. The results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves high performance and fault tolerance with negligible processing overheads. The results also indicate that efficient decentralized hybrid Information Service Architectures can be built by utilizing publish‐subscribe‐based messaging schemes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The concept of consciousness;its seat: present and future

One is at ease in talking about the state of unconsciousness, coma and death, but it is still an enigma to define consciousness. The best way we can define consciousness is ability to interact with environment. Much recent effort has focused on the neurobiological underpinnings of the conscious stage, beginning with experimental studies isolating the roles of several core human brainstructures. In this paper we present the definition and features of state of consciousness and its implications.
Posting Prices with Unknown Distributions

We consider a dynamic auction model, where bidders sequentially arrive to the market. The values of the bidders for the item for sale are independently drawn from a distribution, but this distribution is unknown to the seller. The seller offers a personalized take-it-or-leave-it price for each arriving bidder and aims to maximize revenue. We study how well can such sequential posted-price mechanisms approximate the optimal revenue that would be achieved if the distribution was known to the seller. On the negative side, we show that sequential posted-price mechanisms cannot guarantee a constant fraction of this revenue when the class of candidate distributions is unrestricted. We show that this impossibility holds even for randomized mechanisms and even if the set of possible distributions is very small or when the seller has a prior distribution over the candidate distributions. On the positive side, we devise a simple posted-price mechanism that guarantees a constant fraction of the known-distribution revenue when all candidate distributions exhibit the monotone hazard rate property.
A Paradigmatic Regression Algorithm for Gene Selection Problems

Motivation: Gene selection has become a common task in most gene expression studies. The objective of such research is often to identify the smallest possible set of genes that can still achieve good predictive performance. The problem of assigning tumours to a known class is a particularly important example that has received considerable attention in the last ten years. Many of the classification methods proposed recently require some form of dimension-reduction of the problem. These methods provide a single model as an output and, in most cases, rely on the likelihood function in order to achieve variable selection. Results: We propose a prediction-based objective function that can be tailored to the requirements of practitioners and can be used to assess and interpret a given problem. The direct optimization of such a function can be very difficult because the problem is potentially discontinuous and nonconvex. We therefore propose a general procedure for variable selection that resembles importance sampling to explore the feature space. Our proposal compares favorably with competing alternatives when applied to two cancer data sets in that smaller models are obtained for better or at least comparable classification errors. Furthermore by providing a set of selected models instead of a single one, we construct a network of possible models for a target prediction accuracy level.
Effects of physical activity on endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs)

Physical activity has a therapeutic role in cardiovascular disease (CVD), through its beneficial effects on endothelial function and cardiovascular system. Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are bone marrow (BM) derived cells that represent a novel therapeutic target in CVD patients, because of their ability to home to sites of ischemic injury and repair the damaged vessels. Several studies show that physical activity results in a significant increase in circulating EPCs, and, in particular, there are some evidence of the beneficial exercise-induced effects on EPCs activity in CVD settings, including coronary artery disease (CAD), heart failure (HF), and peripheral artery disease (PAD). The aim of this paper is to review the current evidence about the beneficial effects of physical exercise on endothelial function and EPCs levels and activity in both healthy subjects and patients with CVD.
Story-Level Inference and Gap Filling to Improve Machine Reading

Machine reading aims at extracting formal knowledge representations from text to enable programs to execute some performance task, for example, diagnosis or answering complex queries stated in a formal representation language. Information extraction techniques are a natural starting point for machine reading, however, since they focus on explicit surface features at the phrase and sentence level, they generally miss information only stated implicitly. Moreover, the combination of multiple extraction results leads to error compounding which dramatically affects extraction quality for composite structures. To address these shortcomings, we present a new approach which aggregates locally extracted information into a larger story context and uses abductive constraint reasoning to generate the best story-level interpretation. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves formal question answering performance on complex questions.
Principals’ Instructional Feedback Practices During Race to the Top

ABSTRACT We investigated how 12 K–12 public school principals in a Northeastern U.S. state perceived their role to provide teachers with instructional feedback during Race to the Top (RTTT). Guided by the use of evidence gathered from standardized teaching-practice rubrics, principals reported they provided more honest and frank instructional feedback to teachers regarding their performance. The principals described how the standardized indicators honed their focus on students’ levels of engagement during classroom observations. This study demonstrates how standardized teaching-practice protocols can assist principals’ instructional supervision and evaluation practices, but may not support principals’ or teachers’ pedagogical content-area needs.
Goal Babbling: a New Concept for Early Sensorimotor Exploration

The human body possesses more than 600 skeletal muscles [1]. Performing purposeful actions to achieve some behavioral goal requires a high degree of coordination of these many degrees of freedom. Yet, human infants are born without the most basic coordination skills like reaching for an object [2], which poses the learning of sensorimotor coordination as a fundamental problem in human development. Understanding this ability to learn, and utilizing it for modern robotics systems is one of the major goals of the research fields of cognitive [3] and developmental robotics [4], [5]. We investigate the learning of reaching skills as an exemplary coordination skill. The problem of reaching is to find motor commands (e.g. joint angles of a robot arm) that move the hand, or the robot’s end-effector towards some desired position in space. Thereby motor commands q and outcomes x are connected by a causal relation which is denoted as the forward function f(q) = x. Learning needs to invert this relation in order achieve some desired outcome x∗. This problem setup is not only illustrative, but very prototypical for other coordination problems: it asks the very general question of how to achieve some behavioral goals by means of actions. The skill of reaching itself is also fundamental for both robots and humans, since the positioning in space is necessary for any use of the robot’s gripper or the human’s hand. Successful reaching skills can be well understood with the notion of internal models [6], [7], whereas forward models predict the outcome of an action and inverse models suggest actions in order to achieve a desired outcome. The bootstrapping of internal models without explicit prior-knowledge requires experience that has to be generated by exploration. Machine learning approaches thereby traditionally rely on an exhaustive exploration of all possible motor commands, frequently generated by means of an entire random procedure, which is referred to as “motor babbling” [8], [9]. After the data generation phase, learning and coordination can be phrased in a variety of ways [10], [11], [12]. Yet, exhaustive exploration can not be achieved on high-dimensional motor systems such as the human body, modern humanoid robots, or biomimetic robots like elephant trunks. The sheer number of combinations of commands for different actuators is too large to be explored in the lifetime of any learning agent. Understanding human motor development, as well as the successful application of future robotic systems like the Bionic Handling Assistant (see Fig. 3), demands for concepts and methods that succeed in