Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calpain-Mediated Degradation of Drebrin by Excitotoxicity In vitro and In vivo

The level of drebrin, an evolutionarily conserved f-actin-binding protein that regulates synaptic structure and function, is reduced in the brains of patients with chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Down’s syndrome (DS). It was suggested that excitotoxic neuronal death caused by overactivation of NMDA-type glutamate receptors (NMDARs) occurs in AD and DS; however, the relationship between excitotoxicity and drebrin loss is unknown. Here, we show that drebrin is a novel target of calpain-mediated proteolysis under excitotoxic conditions induced by the overactivation of NMDARs. In cultured rodent neurons, degradation of drebrin was confirmed by the detection of proteolytic fragments, as well as a reduction in the amount of full-length drebrin. Notably, the NMDA-induced degradation of drebrin in mature neurons occurred concomitantly with a loss of f-actin. Furthermore, pharmacological inhibition of f-actin loss facilitated the drebrin degradation, suggesting a functional linkage between f-actin and drebrin degradation. Biochemical analyses using purified drebrin and calpain revealed that calpain degraded drebrin directly in vitro. Furthermore, cerebral ischemia also induced the degradation of drebrin in vivo. These findings suggest that calpain-mediated degradation of drebrin is a fundamental pathology of neurodegenerative diseases mediated by excitotoxicity, regardless of whether they are acute or chronic. Drebrin regulates the synaptic clustering of NMDARs; therefore, degradation of drebrin under excitotoxic conditions may modulate NMDAR-mediated signal transductions, including pro-survival signaling. Overall, the results presented here provide novel insights into the molecular basis of cellular responses to excitotoxicity in vitro and in vivo.
Liberal Trade and Japan: The Incompatibility Issue

A. Liberal Economy: Conception, Concepts and Conflicts. - I. Ideology and the Multilateral Trade System. - II. Trade Theoiy and Ideology: Some Basic Issues. - III. Japan, as a Trade Issue. - B. Japan and Trade: Cartels, Coherence and Competition. - IV. Power and Trade: The Family Economy. - V. Harmony or Economic Power: Japan's Trade Cohesion. - VI. Cementing the Structure: People, Power and Policies. - VII. Economics of the Japanese System and the International Trade Model. - C. Tensions: Currents in Electronics Dumping. - VIII. The Bleak Image of Colour Television. - IX. Video Recorders: A Standard War. - X. Own Brand Laser Beaming: Compact Disc Players. - XI. Big Battle, Micro-Electronics. - D. Japan's Systematic Dumping: An Approach to the Problem. - XII. An Isolated Cartel Economy in World Trade. - XIII. Epilogue. - References.
Nominal Contracts and Monetary Targets

We look for a theoretical justification of nominal wage contracts in household diversification of risk. We assume it is more costly for households than for firms to use financial markets for this purpose. In a calibrated general equilibrium model we find from stochastic simulation that if both productivity and monetary shocks are temporary then optimal wage contracts are overwhelmingly nominal. When the dominant shock-usually money - is persistent, wage indexation or the auction wage share (each a form of 'real wage protection') rises sharply. OECD experience in the 1970s fits the model's prediction of high wage protection; for the 1990s the model predicts little reduction in protection. The model suggests that the persistence in monetary shocks- implying that the central bank targets the growth rate rather than the level of the money supply (or the price level), or 'base drift' as currently practised throughout the OECD- not only raises wage protection but also reduces welfare in a world where productivity shocks are persistent, as both theory and our empirical results suggest they are. This suggests that this central bank practice is due for review.
Small high performance ultra wideband UHF multipurpose planar antenna

In this paper, we present the design and development of a small, high performance, compact Ultra Wideband antenna [1], resonating on a wide range of commonly used Ultra High Frequency (UHF) bands. The antenna's bandwidth ranges from 1.22GHz to above 3GHz. The ultra wide bandwidth was achieved by dispersing the current fed into the feeding block of the antenna into different directions and loops. The antenna has a good omni-directional radiation pattern throughout the operational bandwidth, with a reasonable gain, and a small compact structure, which makes it suitable for many compact wireless devices like global positioning systems, wireless LANs, bluetooth, amateur radios and many others.
The phonetics of emphatic vowel lengthening in Japanese∗

Many languages exploit a short vs. long lexical contrast in vowels. In most, if not all of these languages, the contrast is binary. In Japanese, however, speakers can lengthen vowels to express emphasis, and multiple degrees of lengthening can be used to express different degrees of emphasis. This paper offers the first experimental documentation of this emphatic vowel lengthening phenomenon. The current results demonstrate that, among the seven speakers recorded, at least a few speakers show six-levels of distinction in duration, and all but one speaker showed a steady linear correlation between duration and level of emphasis. We conclude that Japanese speakers have articulatory control that allows them to make very finegrained durational distinctions, which go beyond mere binary short vs. long distinctions.
The Snap! toolkit for developing sensor networks and application to XC skiing

Athletes, health professionals, animal specialists, meteorologists, and other investigators increasingly employ small, human-scale sensor networks in their disciplines. The sensor networks used by each field and study have unique requirements. Regardless, these networks all collect and store data, and often display or transmit them. The Snap! toolkit takes advantage of the similarities among sensor networks to make prototyping them fast and easy. Simultaneously, it acknowledges their inherent differences, remaining flexible in order to accommodate the needs of different systems. Snap! specifies the behavior of the nodes on a sensor network and describes the logical structure of each node and of the network as a whole. The Snap! design places emphasis on the reusability of hardware and software, rather than on the creation of an optimal solution for a given application. One Snap! platform and system has thus far been constructed and tested: a cross-country ski system to gather information on the environment and from the skis and skier. The data collected from the ski system make it possible to quantitatively describe the skier's stride and the effects of a ski's design. Thesis Supervisor: MichaelJ. Hawley Tide: Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Alex Dreyfoos Jr. (1954) Career Development Professor of Media Arts Sciences
Incorporating Prototype Theory in Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep artificial neural networks have made remarkable progress in different tasks in the field of computer vision. However, the empirical analysis of these models and investigation of their failure cases has received attention recently. In this work, we show that deep learning models cannot generalize to atypical images that are substantially different from training images. This is in contrast to the superior generalization ability of the visual system in the human brain. We focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as the state-of-the-art models in object recognition and classification; investigate this problem in more detail, and hypothesize that training CNN models suffer from unstructured loss minimization. We propose computational models to improve the generalization capacity of CNNs by considering how typical a training image looks like. By conducting an extensive set of experiments we show that involving a typicality measure can improve the classification results on a new set of images by a large margin. More importantly, this significant improvement is achieved without fine-tuning the CNN model on the target image set.
S Software Performance Control

complex. At the same time, they are being deployed in applications where performance guarantees are required. Traditional approaches to providing these performance guarantees are not effective for a large class of software systems. Recently, control theory has been identified as a promising theoretical foundation for performance control in complex software applications, such as real-time scheduling, Web servers, multimedia control, storage managers, power control in CPUs, and routing in computer networks. This article describes advances in the application of control theory to software systems. We demonstrate the formulation of software performance assurance problems as those of feedback control. We describe modeling the software system and provide an example of performance control in contemporary Web servers. We embody the control-theoretical methodology for software quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning into a middleware called ControlWare. This middleware provides a generic interface between the computing and control subsystems of a software application and automates many parts of the feedback control design and implementation for software systems. Middleware solutions such as ControlWare are needed to resolve the system challenges and provide analytic foundations to enable efficient software performance control in next-generation performance-assured computing systems.
The Biological Effects of IL-21 Signaling on B-Cell-Mediated Responses in Organ Transplantation

Antibody-mediated rejection has emerged as one of the major issues limiting the success of organ transplantation. It exerts a highly negative impact on graft function and outcome, and effective treatment is lacking. The triggers for antibody development, and the mechanisms leading to graft dysfunction and failure, are incompletely understood. The production of antibodies is dependent on instructions from various immunocytes including CD4 T-helper cells that secrete interleukin (IL)-21 and interact with antigen-specific B-cells via costimulatory molecules. In this article, we discuss the role of IL-21 in the activation and differentiation of B-cells and consider the mechanisms of IL-21 and B-cell interaction. An improved understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in antibody-mediated complications after organ transplantation could lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies, which control humoral alloreactivity, potentially preventing and treating graft-threatening antibody-mediated rejection.
ON THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF CITIES

We prove the existence of a symmetric equilibrium in a circular city in which businesses and housing can both be located anywhere in the city. In this equilibrium, firms balance the external benefits from locating near other producers against the costs of longer commutes for workers. An equilibrium city need not take the form of a central business district surrounded by a residential area. We propose a general algorithm for constructing equilibria, and use it to study the way land use is affected by changes in the model's underlying parameters. Copyright The Econometric Society 2002.
Probabilistic Delay Control and Road Side Unit Placement for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks with Disrupted Connectivity

This paper studies the multihop packet delivery delay in a low density vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). We address a disrupted vehicle-to-infrastructure communication scenario, where an end-to-end path is unlikely to exist between a vehicle and the nearest road side unit (RSU). We present an analytical framework, which takes into account the randomness of vehicle data traffic and the statistical variation of the disrupted communication channel. Our framework employs the effective bandwidth theory and its dual, the effective capacity concept, in order to obtain the maximum distance between RSUs that stochastically limits the worst case packet delivery delay to a certain bound (i.e., allows only an arbitrarily small fraction of the packets received by the farthest vehicle from the RSU to exceed a required delay bound). Our study also investigates the effect of the vehicle density, transmission range, and speed difference between vehicles on the end-to-end packet delivery delay. Extensive simulation results validate our analytical framework.
Boosting Stochastic Newton Descent for Bigdata large scale classification

Efficient Bigdata classification requires low cost learning methods. A standard approach involves Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm (SGD) for the minimization of the Hinge Loss in the primal space. Although complexity of Stochastic Gradient Descent is linear with the number of samples these method suffers from slow convergence. In order to cope with this issue, we propose here a Boosting Stochastic Newton Descent (BSND) method for minimization of any calibrated loss in the primal space. BSND approximates the inverse Hessian by the best low-rank approximation. We validate BSND by benchmarking it against several variants of the state-of-the-art SGD algorithm on the the large scale ImageNet and Higgs dataset. We provide further core optimization for fast convergence. The results on big data set: ImageNet and Higgs display that BSND improves significantly accuracy of the SGD baseline while being faster by orders of magnitude.
A multi-case study examining co-teaching approaches and practices in high school mathematics and literature/composition classes

Special education provides a variety of instructional models to ensure the success of students with disabilities. The increasingly utilized model of co-teaching allows students with disabilities access to the general education environment with the support of special education teachers. The co-teaching model consists of one general and one special education teacher who work together to ensure the success of both the special education and general education students. This qualitative study investigated and explained the co-teaching approaches and practices used by co-teaching partners participating in the academic areas of literature/composition and mathematics classes at the high school level. A multiple case study approach was used to identify the instructional strategies of five special education teachers and five general educations teachers who participated in co-teaching environments. The research was conducted through focus group interviews of the pairs of co-teaching partners from each case, individual participant interviews, and classroom observations. The findings from this study demonstrated that the co-teachers perceive the most effective co-teaching approaches were the supportive approach for high school literature/composition teachers and the teaming approach for high school mathematics teachers. Also, the findings demonstrated that literature/composition teachers identified group work and mathematics teachers identified peer tutoring as effective instructional practices in their classrooms. The findings will be used to share with other high school teachers and administrators to boost the success of co-teaching environments.
THE EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS OF DIRECT PHENOTYPIC OVERDOMINANCE: EMERGENCE POSSIBLE, LOSS PROBABLE

Abstract An evolutionary dynamical system with explicit diploid genetics is used to investigate the likelihood of observing phenotypically overdominant heterozygotes versus heterozygous phenotypes that are intermediate between the homozygotes. In this model, body size evolves in a population with discrete demographic episodes and with competition limiting reproduction. A genotype-phenotype map for body size is used that can generate the two qualitative types of dominance interactions (overdominance versus intermediate dominance). It is written as a single-locus model with one focal locus and parameters summarizing the effects of alleles at other loci. Two types of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS; continuously stable strategy, CSS) occur. The ESS is generated either (1) by the population ecology; or (2) by a local maximum of the genotype-phenotype map. Overdominant heterozygotes are expected to arise if the population evolves toward the second type of ESS, where nearly maximum body sizes are found. When other loci with partially dominant inheritance also evolve, the location of the maximum in the genotype-phenotype map repeatedly changes. It is unlikely that an evolving population will track these changes; ESSs of the second type now are at best quasi-stationary states of the evolutionary dynamics. Considering the restrictions on its probability, a pattern of phenotypic overdominance is expected to be rare. Editor: D.A. Roff
An 8 8 InP Monolithic Tunable Optical Router ( MOTOR ) Packet Forwarding Chip

In this paper, we demonstrate single-channel operation of the first InP monolithic tunable optical router (MOTOR) chip designed to function as the packet forwarding engine of an all-optical router. The device has eight-input and eight-output ports and is capable of 40-Gb/s operation per port with bit-error rates below 1E-9. MOTOR integrates eight wavelength-tunable differential Mach–Zehnder semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) wavelength converters with preamplifiers and a passive 8 8 arrayed-waveguide grating router. Each wavelength converter employs a widely tunable sampled-grating distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) laser for efficient wavelength switching across the C band and other functions required for 40-Gb/s wavelength conversion. Active and passive regions of the chip are defined through a robust quantum well intermixing process to optimize the gain in the wavelength converters and minimize the propagation losses in passive sections of the chip. The device is one of the most complex photonic integrated circuits (PICs) reported to date, with dimensions of 4.25 mm 14.5 mm and more than 200 functional elements integrated on-chip. We demonstrate single-channel wavelength conversion and channel switching with this device using pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) data at 40 Gb/s. A power penalty as low as 4.5 dB was achieved with less than 2-W drive power per channel.
Automated Video Registration in Home Cage for Measuring Maternal Behavior of Wild, Aggressive and Tame Rats

This work is aimed to study the maternal behavior using visual observation and automated video registration system in tame, aggressive and wild gray rats. It is shown that the frequencies of “outside the nest” and mother licking/grooming do not depend on the used methods in tame dams. The presence of observer is accompanied by decreasing of the frequency of these parameters in aggressive dams. It is supposed that this effect is associated with increased emotionality and stress responsiveness in aggressive females as compared with the tame females. The frequency of maternal arched-back nursing is decreased under visual observation compared with automated video registration in females of both lines. Maternal aggression of both selected lines and wild population is recorded using the same registration system. It is shown that maternal aggression towards unknown male conspecific is lower in wild rats, than in tame and aggressive ones.
The Microeconomics of Macroeconomic Asymmetries: Sectoral Driving Forces and Firm Level Characteristics

There is now considerable evidence that business cycle variation in output and employment in the U.S. differs in expansions and contractions. We present nonparametric evidence that asymmetries are strongest in durable goods manufacturing. In a Markov switching framework, we find two leading indicators, consumer expectations and the term spread, act as important driving forces behind asymmetry. Cross sectional analysis, using firm level data, shows that plant and equipment expenditures, raw materials inventory holdings, and bankruptcy score increase the likelihood ratio index for asymmetry by more than 65%.
Optimal Dynamic Contests

We study the design of optimal incentives in a two-player dynamic contest. Two players continuously spend costly effort to attain a score lead, which is also affected by noise. The first player to reach a predetermined score difference (finish line) wins a prize. We focus on the choice of the optimal prize for the winner and on the optimal scoring rule, which penalizes or boosts the leader at each point in the game. We solve for a Symmetric Markov Perfect Equilibrium of the contest, and use it to evaluate a few possible principal's objectives. We find that equilibrium effort is always positive, increasing or hump-shaped in own lead, and the leader always exerts more effort than the follower. These results replicate in our continuous time, continuous state space setting those obtained by Harris and Vickers (1987) in a different discrete time, discrete state model. Our model is more tractable and affords our main innovation, the normative analysis of this game. Due to the strategic interaction, the optimal prize that maximizes expected total agents' output is finite even if effort costs and the value of the prize are of no concern to the principal. Too large a prize and the strategic complementarities of agents' efforts generate an initial war phase, followed by low effort thereafter and whenever the lead is not very small. We conjecture that the optimal scoring rule entails penalizing the leader to keep the laggard from giving up, despite the adverse ex ante incentives of this rule. We show how to solve numerically for the optimal scoring rule.
Autonomic changes with seizures correlate with postictal EEG suppression

Objective: Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) poses a poorly understood but considerable risk to people with uncontrolled epilepsy. There is controversy regarding the significance of postictal generalized EEG suppression as a biomarker for SUDEP risk, and it remains unknown whether postictal EEG suppression has a neurologic correlate. Here, we examined the profile of autonomic alterations accompanying seizures with a wrist-worn biosensor and explored the relationship between autonomic dysregulation and postictal EEG suppression. Methods: We used custom-built wrist-worn sensors to continuously record the sympathetically mediated electrodermal activity (EDA) of patients with refractory epilepsy admitted to the long-term video-EEG monitoring unit. Parasympathetic-modulated high-frequency (HF) power of heart rate variability was measured from concurrent EKG recordings. Results: A total of 34 seizures comprising 22 complex partial and 12 tonic-clonic seizures from 11 patients were analyzed. The postictal period was characterized by a surge in EDA and heightened heart rate coinciding with persistent suppression of HF power. An increase in the EDA response amplitude correlated with an increase in the duration of EEG suppression (r = 0.81, p = 0.003). Decreased HF power correlated with an increase in the duration of EEG suppression (r = −0.87, p = 0.002). Conclusion: The magnitude of both sympathetic activation and parasympathetic suppression increases with duration of EEG suppression after tonic-clonic seizures. These results provide autonomic correlates of postictal EEG suppression and highlight a critical window of postictal autonomic dysregulation that may be relevant in the pathogenesis of SUDEP.