Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Polyproline Site in Hinge 2 Influences the Functional Capacity of Truncated Dystrophins

Mutations in dystrophin can lead to Duchenne muscular dystrophy or the more mild form of the disease, Becker muscular dystrophy. The hinge 3 region in the rod domain of dystrophin is particularly prone to deletion mutations. In-frame deletions of hinge 3 are predicted to lead to BMD, however the severity of disease can vary considerably. Here we performed extensive structure-function analyses of truncated dystrophins with modified hinges and spectrin-like repeats in mdx mice. We found that the polyproline site in hinge 2 profoundly influences the functional capacity of a microdystrophinΔR4-R23/ΔCT with a large deletion in the hinge 3 region. Inclusion of polyproline in microdystrophinΔR4-R23/ΔCT led to small myofibers (12% smaller than wild-type), Achilles myotendinous disruption, ringed fibers, and aberrant neuromuscular junctions in the mdx gastrocnemius muscles. Replacing hinge 2 of microdystrophinΔR4-R23/ΔCT with hinge 3 significantly improved the functional capacity to prevent muscle degeneration, increase muscle fiber area, and maintain the junctions. We conclude that the rigid α-helical structure of the polyproline site significantly impairs the functional capacity of truncated dystrophins to maintain appropriate connections between the cytoskeleton and extracellular matrix.
Measuring Asymmetric Opinions on Online Social Interrelationship by Synthetizing the Interactive Language and Social Network Features

Instead of studying the properties of social relationship from an objective view, in this paper, we focus on individuals’ subjective and asymmetric opinions on their interrelationships. Inspired by the theories from sociolinguistics, we investigate two individuals’ opinions on their interrelationship with their interactive language features. Eliminating the difference of personal language style, we clarify that the asymmetry of interactive language feature values can indicate individuals’ asymmetric opinions on their interrelationship. We also discuss how the degree of opinions’ asymmetry is related to the individual’s personality traits. Furthermore, to measure the individuals’ asymmetric opinions on interrelationship concretely, we develop a novel model synthetizing interactive language and social network features. The experimental results with Enron email dataset provide multiple evidences of the asymmetric opinions on interrelationship, and also verify the effectiveness of the proposed model in measuring the degree of opinions’ asymmetry.
Characteristics of Power-Line Channels in Cargo Ships

The broadband PLC in cargo ships is a long-awaited technology. However the characteristics of power-line channels in the cargo ships have not been studied yet. The most unique point of the channels is that power-line cables used in most Asian cargo ships are shielded. In order to characterize the channel and investigate a suitable PLC system to the cargo ships, some parameters were measured in three typical ships. The parameters were the transfer functions (LCTR, LTR and TTR), LCL and stationary noise spectrum. From these measurements, (1) the required dynamic range of receivers, (2) average attenuation at distribution boards, (3) phase coupling loss and (4) average LCL values were derived in this paper. Since the cables are shielded and the hull provides the good ground, the usage of the common-mode transmission in addition to the conventional differential-mode, which is referred to as a dual-mode transmission system, is also proposed. Therefore the measured parameters above were included the common-mode and mode-conversion properties. As the evidence to support our proposal, some results in which the LCTR values were superior to the TTR values are shown.
Onset Risk and Draft Animal Investment in Nigeria

Onset risk, the uncertainty in the onset of rainy season, is an important element of weather risk for African farmers with little access to formal insurance who engage in traditional rainfed farming. A knowledge gap still exists empirically on how onset risk may affect the investment decisions of these farmers. In particular, farm productivity in Africa still depends on substantial labor inputs at the onset of the rainy season, sometimes involving seasonal migration to rural areas. With credit and insurance market failure, poor access to weather-related information, and high labor mobility costs, high and increasing onset risk may affect farmersâ€™ demand for farm mechanization. We test this hypothesis by investigating the effect of onset risk on farmersâ€™ investment in draft animals in northern and central Nigeria. We use the example of a public project providing farmers with financial support for the acquisition of productive assets. We calculate the onset of the rainy season using daily rainfall data in various locations across Nigeria and identify locations that have experienced increasing, decreasing, or constant onset risk in the past few decades. We then exploit the panel structure of our dataset and employ stratified propensity score matching to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated, differentiated by the onset risk and its change. The results support our hypothesis. Farmers in areas with higher, increasing, or constant onset risk were more likely to invest in draft animals, and such effects are clearer among larger-scale farmers. Linkages are also clearer with onset risk compared to annual rainfall risk.
Fabrication and Physical Evaluation of Gelatin-Coated Carbonate Apatite Foam

Carbonate apatite (CO3Ap) foam has gained much attention in recent years because of its ability to rapidly replace bone. However, its mechanical strength is extremely low for clinical use. In this study, to understand the potential of gelatin-reinforced CO3Ap foam for bone replacement, CO3Ap foam was reinforced with gelatin and the resulting physical characteristics were evaluated. The mechanical strength increased significantly with the gelatin reinforcement. The compressive strength of gelatin-free CO3Ap foam was 74 kPa whereas that of the gelatin-reinforced CO3Ap foam, fabricated using 30 mass % gelatin solution, was approximately 3 MPa. Heat treatment for crosslinking gelatin had little effect on the mechanical strength of the foam. The gelatin-reinforced foam did not maintain its shape when immersed in a saline solution as this promoted swelling of the gelatin; however, in the same conditions, the heat-treated gelatin-reinforced foam proved to be stable. It is concluded, therefore, that heat treatment is the key to the fabrication of stable gelatin-reinforced CO3Ap foam.
A comprehensive literature review of asymmetric key cryptography algorithms for establishment of the existing gap

Information security has become a key concern for communication over public channels thus necessitating the use of cryptography to safeguard communication. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the asymmetric key algorithms, beginning from the inception of asymmetric cryptography in 1976 till the present day. This paper provides a description of their encryption and decryption operations, points out their security basis, areas of implementation, their strengths and weaknesses during operation. Finally, the paper pinpoints the existing gap based on conclusions drawn from the review, with particular emphasis on an algorithm most suited for industrial application given the current trends in cryptography towards quantum computing. This paper then narrows down on the earnest need for an algorithm that has no trade-off in encryption and decryption speeds, has low computation overhead and is secure enough to withstand quantum algorithm attacks.
Optimal Ancient DNA Yields from the Inner Ear Part of the Human Petrous Bone

The invention and development of next or second generation sequencing methods has resulted in a dramatic transformation of ancient DNA research and allowed shotgun sequencing of entire genomes from fossil specimens. However, although there are exceptions, most fossil specimens contain only low (~ 1% or less) percentages of endogenous DNA. The only skeletal element for which a systematically higher endogenous DNA content compared to other skeletal elements has been shown is the petrous part of the temporal bone. In this study we investigate whether (a) different parts of the petrous bone of archaeological human specimens give different percentages of endogenous DNA yields, (b) there are significant differences in average DNA read lengths, damage patterns and total DNA concentration, and (c) it is possible to obtain endogenous ancient DNA from petrous bones from hot environments. We carried out intra-petrous comparisons for ten petrous bones from specimens from Holocene archaeological contexts across Eurasia dated between 10,000-1,800 calibrated years before present (cal. BP). We obtained shotgun DNA sequences from three distinct areas within the petrous: a spongy part of trabecular bone (part A), the dense part of cortical bone encircling the osseous inner ear, or otic capsule (part B), and the dense part within the otic capsule (part C). Our results confirm that dense bone parts of the petrous bone can provide high endogenous aDNA yields and indicate that endogenous DNA fractions for part C can exceed those obtained for part B by up to 65-fold and those from part A by up to 177-fold, while total endogenous DNA concentrations are up to 126-fold and 109-fold higher for these comparisons. Our results also show that while endogenous yields from part C were lower than 1% for samples from hot (both arid and humid) parts, the DNA damage patterns indicate that at least some of the reads originate from ancient DNA molecules, potentially enabling ancient DNA analyses of samples from hot regions that are otherwise not amenable to ancient DNA analyses.
The Science of NOAA's Operational Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service

NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) is implementing a short- to long-range Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service (HEFS). The HEFS addresses the need to quantify uncertainty in hydrologic forecasts for flood risk management, water supply management, streamflow regulation, recreation planning, and ecosystem management, among other applications. The HEFS extends the existing hydrologic ensemble services to include short-range forecasts, incorporate additional weather and climate information, and better quantify the major uncertainties in hydrologic forecasting. It provides, at forecast horizons ranging from 6 h to about a year, ensemble forecasts and verification products that can be tailored to users' needs. Based on separate modeling of the input and hydrologic uncertainties, the HEFS includes 1) the Meteorological Ensemble Forecast Processor, which ingests weather and climate forecasts from multiple numerical weather prediction models to produce bias-corrected forcing ensembles at the hydrologic basin sc.
Cdk2: a key regulator of the senescence control function of Myc

Proto-oncogenes such as MYC and RAS promote normal cell growth but fuel tumor development when deregulated. However, over-activated Myc and Ras also trigger intrinsic tumor suppressor mechanisms leading to apoptosis and senescence, respectively. When expressed together MYC and RAS are sufficient for oncogenic transformation of primary rodent cells, but the basis for their cooperativity has remained unresolved. While Ras is known to suppress Myc-induced apoptosis, we recently discovered that Myc is able to repress Ras-induced senescence. Myc and Ras thereby together enable evasion of two main barriers of tumorigenesis. The ability of Myc to suppress senescence was dependent on phosphorylation of Myc at Ser-62 by cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (Cdk2), uncovering a new non-redundant role of this kinase. Further, utilizing Cdk2 as a cofactor, Myc directly controlled key genes involved in senescence. We speculate that this new role of Myc/Cdk2 in senescence has relevance for other Myc functions, such as regulation of stemness, self-renewal, immortalization and differentiation, which may have an impact on tissue regeneration. Importantly, selective pharmacological inhibition of Cdk2 forced Myc/Ras expressing cells into cellular senescence, highlighting this kinase as a potential therapeutic target for treatment of tumors driven by Myc or Ras.
A novel resource optimization scheme for multi-cell OFDMA relay network

In cellular networks, users communicate with each other through their respective base stations (BSs). Conventionally, users are assumed to be in different cells. BSs serve as decode-and-forward (DF) relay nodes to users. In addition to this type of conventional user, we recognize that there are scenarios users who want to communicate with each other are located in the same cell. This gives rise to the scenario of intra-cell communication. In this case, a BS can behave as a two-way relay to achieve information exchange instead of using conventional DF relay. We consider a multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) network that comprises these two types of users. We are interested in resource allocation between them. Specifically, we jointly optimize subcarrier assignment, subcarrier pairing, and power allocation to maximize the weighted sum rate. We consider the resource allocation problem at BSs when the end users’ power is fixed. We solve the problem approximately through Lagrange dual decomposition. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes outperform other existing schemes.
Service Innovation in Hospitality Human Resource Management Website: Service Concept of Searching Creative Chef

Service innovation for searching creative chef has become an issue of hospitality human resource management (HRM) website. Creative Chef has been the key of competitive advantage not only for culinary industry but also for hospitality HRM website. The purpose of this research is to explore chef’s creativity for the service innovation of hospitality HRM website. Qualitative method was conducted to reveal the origin of chef’s creativity. The Result shows that model of personal characteristics and environmental factors can help to identify creative chef for hospitality HRM website and culinary industry.
An Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on the Android Mobile Platform

Peer-to-peer applications have witnessed a huge growth in popularity over the last decade. At the same time, mobile phones have experienced a similar surge in terms of their usability and power. Due to these changes, this paper proposes a file transfer application that will help determine if creating a peer-to-peer application for mobile devices is feasible. Keywords-peer-to-peer; android; power consumption; mobile device; Bluetooth; WiFi
Mesencephalic THmRNA‐reduced expression by blocking axonal transport with colchicine

COLCHICINE, an axonal transport blocking agent, was unilaterally injected in the medial forebrain bundle of rats. As early as 18 h after the injection a rapid decrease in TH-mRNA level was observed in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA) on the injected side. In contrast, TH protein levels remained stable for 48 h, and decreased later in both cells bodies and terminals (caudate/putamen). The number of TH-immunopositive cells in SN/VTA increased after colchicine equally in both sides, excluding a neurotoxic effect. These results suggest that TH gene expression is controlled by a retrogradely transported activating factor rather than by feedback inhibition by the end product, i.e. TH protein.
A Distributed Realtime Dialogue Architecture for Dynamically Learning Polite Human Turntaking

Giving synthetic agents human-like real-time turntaking skills is a challenging task. Attempts have been made to manually construct such skills, with systematic categorization of silences, prosody and other candidate turn-giving signals, and to use analysis of corpora to produce static decision trees for this purpose. However, for general-purpose turntaking and other skills that may be highly variable across individuals and cultures, a better solution would be a system that can learn such skills on-the-job. We are exploring ways to use incremental perception and machine learning to have an agent learn proper turntaking during interaction. We have implemented a listening/talking agent that continuously adjusts its turntaking behavior to its interlocutors based on incremental real-time analysis of the other party’s prosody. The system works in a real-world setting, achieving robust learning in spite of noisy data. Results show performance to be close to a human’s in natural, polite dialogue, with 20% of the turn transitions taking place in under 300 msecs and 50% under 500 msecs.
EXAMINING LEADER MEMBER EXCHANGE PROCESS BY USING VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL ACTIONS: COMPARING TWO GROUPS AND ANALYZING WITH T-PATTERN

In this study, two groups of academic and administrative personnel of the same university were interviewed; verbal and non-verbal actions through the program named THEME to obtain information about the leader-member relationship. The outcomes were evaluated according to the status of adaptation and the comparison between the two groups was made accordingly. Group A is from administrative staff; Group B comes from the academic staff. The video data of each participant was coded with behavior coder and sent to THEME and the results were compared between the participants in each group and afterwards between groups. Leader-member relations have been addressed in terms of respondents' responses.
Incremental learning to reduce the burden of machine learning for P300 speller

The P300 speller is one of the BCI applications, which allows users to select letters just by thoughts. However, due to the difference of P300 in each person and with the passage of time, users are required to do machine learning every time before use (pre-training). This pre-training is a burden to users. This paper proposes an incremental learning using unknown data to reduce the training time. Consequently, this paper shows that the proposed method gives not only the reduction of the training time but also directly use of P300 speller without pre-training by using the data of last time.
Case Study Research and Theory Building

The problem and the solution. This chapter overviews case study research and proposes a manner in which case study research can contribute to theory building in applied disciplines. Although theory building using case study research has been discussed previously in the literature, there is no clarity as to how case study research can be used to build theory. Moreover, it should not be assumed that there is clarity on the processes of case writing, case studies, or case study research. This chapter presents definitions, purposes, and elements of case study research for the purpose of understanding how case study research can be used to build theory in applied disciplines.
Incorporation of Speech Duration Information in Score Fusion of Speaker Recognition Systems

In recent years identity-vector (i-vector) based speaker verification (SV) systems have become very successful. Nevertheless, environmental noise and speech duration variability still have a significant effect on degrading the performance of these systems. In many real-life applications, duration of recordings are very short; as a result, extracted i-vectors cannot reliably represent the attributes of the speaker. Here, we investigate the effect of speech duration on the performance of three state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems. In addition, using a variety of available score fusion methods, we investigate the effect of score fusion for those speaker verification techniques to benefit from the performance difference of different methods under different enrollment and test speech duration conditions. This technique performed significantly better than the baseline score fusion methods.
A Peer E-Mentoring Employment Program for Youth With Physical Disabilities: What are the Social Supports That are Needed and Provided?

Background: The employment readiness of youth with physical disabilities may improve from social support offered through peer e-mentoring. Little is known regarding the nature of social support within a randomized control trial (RCT) of peer e-mentoring. Objective: To explore the social support needs of youth with physical disabilities with regards to employment readiness and to explore the nature of social support in a peer e-mentoring
Recurrent learning of input-output stable behaviour in function space: A case study with the Roessler attractor

We analyse the stability of the input-output behaviour of a recurrent network. It is trained to implement an operator implicitly given by the chaotic dynamics of the Roessler attractor. Two of the attractors coordinate functions are used as network input and the third defines the reference output. Using previously developed methods we show that the trained network is input-output stable and compute its input-output gain. Further we define a stable region in weight space in which weights can freely vary without affecting the input-output stability. We show that this region is large enough to allow stability preserving online adaptation which enables the network to cope with parameter drift in the referenced attractor dynamics.
Performance of graph reconstruction method for large-scale web graph analysis

We have already proposed a graph analysis method that could shorten the analysis time by reconstructing a web graph. In our proposed method, a web graph is reconstructed for parallel distributed processing of possible graphs by clustering a web graph and reconstructing the web graph for Compression Graph and Cluster Graphs. Compression Graph represents the relationship between clusters, whereas Cluster Graph contains nodes belonging to each cluster. When analyzing Compression Graph and Cluster Graphs, they can be processed in parallel because there is no relationship between Compression Graph and Cluster Graphs. Further examining our previous study in which we considered a small web graph, in the present paper, we discuss the performance of the proposed method on a large-scale web graph by experiments.
(S)-α-Chlorohydrin Inhibits Protein Tyrosine Phosphorylation through Blocking Cyclic AMP - Protein Kinase A Pathway in Spermatozoa

α-Chlorohydrin is a common contaminant in food. Its (S)-isomer, (S)-α-chlorohydrin (SACH), is known for causing infertility in animals by inhibiting glycolysis of spermatozoa. The aim of present work was to examine the relationship between SACH and protein tyrosine phosphorylation (PTP), which plays a critical role in regulating mammalian sperm capacitation. In vitro exposure of SACH 50 µM to isolated rat epididymal sperm inhibited PTP. Sperm-specific glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDS) activities, the intracellular adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) levels, 3′-5′-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) levels and phosphorylation of protein kinase A (PKA) substrates in rat sperm were diminished dramatically, indicating that both glycolysis and the cAMP/PKA signaling pathway were impaired by SACH. The inhibition of both PTP and phosphorylation of PKA substrates by SACH could be restored by addition of cAMP analog dibutyryl-cAMP (dbcAMP) and phosphodiesterase inhibitor 3-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine (IBMX). Moreover, addition of glycerol protected glycolysis, ATP levels, phosphorylation of PKA substrates and PTP against the influence of SACH. These results suggested SACH inhibited PTP through blocking cAMP/PKA pathway in sperm, and PTP inhibition may play a role in infertility associated with SACH.