Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infant touching behaviours during mother-infant face-to-face interactions : effects of changes in maternal emotional and physical availability in normative and at-risk populations

Mother-infant interactions are fundamental to infant socio-emotional development. Through mutually regulated exchanges in the first year of life, infants develop critical communicative and regulatory skills. Infant touch is a central channel through which infants communicate their underlying affective states, regulate their emotions, and explore their surroundings. Yet despite its importance, there is a paucity of research examining infant touch. The current dissertation was designed to investigate infants' touching behaviours during mother-infant face-to-face interactions. A series of two studies investigating infant touch in the context of infants' other communicative modalities during interactions with variations in maternal availability was conducted. Study 1 examined how touch co-occurs with distal modalities (i.e. gaze, affect), and investigated the functions of touch (i.e. communicative, regulatory, exploratory). Findings revealed that touch is organized with gaze and affect into meaningful affective displays, and that infants use touch to self-regulate and explore when mothers are emotionally unavailable. The impact of the quality of the relationship (i.e. maternal emotional availability indicators, such as sensitivity and hostility) on infants' touching behaviours was also examined. Findings demonstrated greater engagement through touch in infants with more sensitive mothers. Study 2 investigated infants' touching behaviours in an at-risk sample of depressed and non-depressed mothers exhibiting poor relationship indicators (i.e. sub-optimal emotional availability). Touch was compared during periods of emotional versus physical unavailability, revealing greater reactive types of touch during physical unavailability. Findings also highlighted the impact of maternal risk on infants' touching behaviours: infants of depressed mothers exhibited more reactive types of touch compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, and negative relationship indicators (e.g. maternal hostility, intrusiveness) predicted regulatory tactile behaviours. Taken together, the present findings contribute to current knowledge on touch during early socio-emotional development. Results underscore that infants are active participants during their social exchanges and that they vary their tactile behaviours as a function of maternal availability. The findings clarify how infants use touch (i.e. to regulate, explore) when mothers are unavailable, and imply that touch serves a communicative role during pre-verbal development. Finally, this research offers insight into the impact of maternal risk on infants' regulatory abilities and the dyadic processes of co-regulation
The low energy signaling network

Stress impacts negatively on plant growth and crop productivity, caicultural production worldwide. Throughout their life, plants are often confronted with multiple types of stress that affect overall cellular energy status and activate energy-saving responses. The resulting low energy syndrome (LES) includes transcriptional, translational, and metabolic reprogramming and is essential for stress adaptation. The conserved kinases sucrose-non-fermenting-1-related protein kinase-1 (SnRK1) and target of rapamycin (TOR) play central roles in the regulation of LES in response to stress conditions, affecting cellular processes and leading to growth arrest and metabolic reprogramming. We review the current understanding of how TOR and SnRK1 are involved in regulating the response of plants to low energy conditions. The central role in the regulation of cellular processes, the reprogramming of metabolism, and the phenotypic consequences of these two kinases will be discussed in light of current knowledge and potential future developments.
Speech Reporting as a Discourse Strategy: Some Issues of Acquisition and Use.

This paper examines approaches to the analysis of speech reporting, finding that these approaches fall into two broad categories: traditional approaches which emphasize the syntactic dimension of speech reporting and are informed by an autonomous model of language and discourse pragmatic approaches which emphasize the interaction of syntactic, pragmatic and stylistic factors in discourse. A model for speech reporting strategies in discourse is proposed, involving direct and indirect speech reporting strategies and a ‘lexicalization strategy’. Using this model, a number of approaches to the function of direct speech reporting strategies in the early stages of SLA are reviewed, which analyze the function of direct speech reporting as a ‘compensatory discourse strategy’, not as stylistic variation. It is argued that this analysis is informed by the traditional approach to speech reporting and does not take into account the ‘lexicalization strategy’. When the lexicalization strategy is considered, direct speech is found to function both referentially and stylistically in learner discourse. The argument is illustrated via an analysis of speech reporting in narrative in learner varieties of English and German.
A Limited Resources-Based Approach to Coding for Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Coding for the wireless video sensor networks should be a different issue from the coding for video telephony applications. There are two special features observed in the video sensor networks, limited resources, and low fidelity. Due to these features, coding for this network application requires a new perspective. It is a direction for coding to be of simple structure and not for the entertainment purpose but sufficient for the basic sensing needs. Our coding method is accordingly developed as follows: motion compensation followed by a new idea of shape compensation to replace the conventional residue discrete cosine transform coding. More specifically, our binary images are coded by the motion vectors and the class of morphological filters to achieve a bit rate below 10 kp/s. The resources (bandwidth, power, and hardware) are thus altogether significantly saved. This limited resources approach is the first time particularly investigated for the wireless sensor networks.
Window Detection in Frontal Facades

In this paper, we describe a novel technique to identify and extract windows from a building’s frontal facade. Feature detection in buildings has long been an area of research interest for its applications in 3D city modeling and scene visualization. We utilize a combination of projection profiles, mutual information, and a feature extraction technique (Snake Algorithm). We have found this approach to work quite well on regular facade structures, and we conclude with a more detailed discussion of our results.
Structure of Importin-α from a Filamentous Fungus in Complex with a Classical Nuclear Localization Signal

Neurospora crassa is a filamentous fungus that has been extensively studied as a model organism for eukaryotic biology, providing fundamental insights into cellular processes such as cell signaling, growth and differentiation. To advance in the study of this multicellular organism, an understanding of the specific mechanisms for protein transport into the cell nucleus is essential. Importin-α (Imp-α) is the receptor for cargo proteins that contain specific nuclear localization signals (NLSs) that play a key role in the classical nuclear import pathway. Structures of Imp-α from different organisms (yeast, rice, mouse, and human) have been determined, revealing that this receptor possesses a conserved structural scaffold. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the Impα mechanism of action may vary significantly for different organisms or for different isoforms from the same organism. Therefore, structural, functional, and biophysical characterization of different Impα proteins is necessary to understand the selectivity of nuclear transport. Here, we determined the first crystal structure of an Impα from a filamentous fungus which is also the highest resolution Impα structure already solved to date (1.75 Å). In addition, we performed calorimetric analysis to determine the affinity and thermodynamic parameters of the interaction between Imp-α and the classical SV40 NLS peptide. The comparison of these data with previous studies on Impα proteins led us to demonstrate that N. crassa Imp-α possess specific features that are distinct from mammalian Imp-α but exhibit important similarities to rice Imp-α, particularly at the minor NLS binding site.
A Performance Management System for Telecommunication Network Using AI Techniques

Anomaly detection has become more and more difficult for telecommunication network due to the various trends of networking technologies and the growing number of unauthorized activities in the performance data. This paper builds up a performance management system based on the one-class-support vector machine (OCSVM) and k-means clustering algorithm, which achieves not only the automatic detection of network anomalies but also the clustering of the anomalies with different levels. The OCSVM detects the anomalies by solving an optimal problem to separate the nominal data from the anomalies; these detected anomalies are then classified into minor, medium and severe levels using k-means clustering. The real telecommunication performance data are employed in this paper for the investigation, and the numerical results demonstrate the promising performance of this system.
Modelling Primary System Activity in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks by Aggregated ON/OFF-Processes

Accurate modelling of primary system activity is key to reliable performance evaluation of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) technologies. Measurements on spectrum use show that in some cases the lengths of the vacant periods in a given frequency band can be correlated, a feature commonly used semi-Markov ON/OFF-models cannot reproduce. In this paper we study the stochastic properties of a simple primary system activity model constructed by aggregating the realisations of several semi-Markov ON/OFF-models. We show that despite its simplicity, our model does result in the desired correlations provided heavy-tailed distributions are used for the period length distributions of the individual processes. We also study in detail the statistical behaviour of our model as parameters such as number of processes being aggregated and distributions of the period lengths are changed. The results show that by suitable parameter selection wide range of behaviours can be modelled, making the model of interest in performance evaluation of algorithms and protocols for DSA networks.
Operieren wir die Glaukome zu spät?

Zusammenfassung Aus der Sicht des operativen Glaukomatologen fragt man sich, warum die Patienten erst sehr spät zur Operation zugewiesen werden. Meist besteht schon zur Zeit der Zuweisung zur filtrierenden Operation nach vielen Jahren der konventionellen Therapie ein sowohl funktionell als auch morphologisch fortgeschrittener Glaukomschaden, zusätzlich ist auch oft noch der Augeninnendruck unter einer lokalen Maximaltherapie dekompensiert. Zusätzlich kommt hinzu, dass die Patienten oft ein fortgeschrittenes Alter aufweisen und schon viele Jahre lang mit verschiedenen Kombinationen aus Tropfen therapiert wurden. Sehr spät gestellte Diagnosen stellen eher die Ausnahme dar. Die Gründe für diese späte Zuweisung sind vielfältig. Neben der immer besseren (besser verträglichen und wirksamen) medikamentösen Glaukomtherapie spielen die Abneigung der Patienten gegen den operativen Eingriff (da keine Verbesserung des Sehvermögens zu erwarten ist) und die bis jetzt (noch) nicht verfügbare optimale Glaukomoperation eine entscheidende Rolle. Anhand einer kleinen retrospektiven Studie der letzten 274 zur filtrierenden Glaukomoperation zugewiesenen Patienten sollen die Kriterien für eine rechtzeitige Indikationsstellung erarbeitet und kritisch analysiert werden. In dieser Studie zeigt sich, dass rund ¾ aller Glaukompatienten spät oder zu spät zur Glaukomoperation zugewiesen werden. Für den niedergelassenen Ophthalmologen ohne Spezialisierung im Glaukombereich werden Kriterien formuliert, wann ein Patient zur Glaukomoperation zugewiesen werden sollte. Diese Kriterien sind grundsätzlich für alle Glaukomoperationen anzuwenden. Die Vor- und Nachteile einer filtrierenden Glaukomoperation werden jedoch besonders hervorgehoben, da dieser Eingriff nach wie vor den Goldstandard darstellt. Da aber die Trabekulektomie leider kein optimaler Glaukomeingriff ist, bestehen berechtigte Hoffnungen, dass die moderneren, weniger invasiven und damit auch weniger risikobehafteten Glaukomeingriffe (MIGS) die Indikationen für einen drucksenkenden Eingriff erweitern und damit die Hemmschwelle für die Zuweisung zur Glaukomoperation herabsetzen.
Effect of osmolarity on cation fluxes in medullary thick ascending limb cells.

The effects of a hypertonic extracellular medium on furosemide-sensitive Na and K fluxes were studied in isolated cells from the rabbit medullary thick ascending limb of Henle's loop (mTALH). In the control incubation medium, the furosemide-sensitive 22Na uptake was 379.1 +/- 24.4 pmol . mg protein-1 . min-1 and the furosemide-sensitive 86Rb uptake was 30.5 +/- 16.9. The furosemide-sensitive 22Na flux was not stimulated by K gradients directed into the cells, and, conversely, the furosemide-sensitive 86Rb flux was not stimulated by Na gradients directed into the cells. These findings are consistent with a Na-Cl cotransport system. In the presence of 200 mM mannitol, the furosemide-sensitive 22Na and 86Rb fluxes were increased dramatically to 919.4 +/- 76.6 and 106.1 +/- 29.2 pmol . mg protein-1 . min-1, respectively. When the osmolarity of the incubation medium was increased, not only were the furosemide-sensitive fluxes increased but these fluxes became inter-dependent, i.e., removing Na or K prevented the increase in the furosemide-sensitive flux of the other cation. This finding is consistent with a Na-K-2Cl cotransport system in the mTALH cells. The data suggest that the Na-Cl and the Na-K-2Cl cotransport systems may be distinct functions of the same furosemide-sensitive cotransport system and that their expression may be regulated by changes in cell volume.
ArrayExpress update—simplifying data submissions

The ArrayExpress Archive of Functional Genomics Data (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress) is an international functional genomics database at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) recommended by most journals as a repository for data supporting peer-reviewed publications. It contains data from over 7000 public sequencing and 42 000 array-based studies comprising over 1.5 million assays in total. The proportion of sequencing-based submissions has grown significantly over the last few years and has doubled in the last 18 months, whilst the rate of microarray submissions is growing slightly. All data in ArrayExpress are available in the MAGE-TAB format, which allows robust linking to data analysis and visualization tools and standardized analysis. The main development over the last two years has been the release of a new data submission tool Annotare, which has reduced the average submission time almost 3-fold. In the near future, Annotare will become the only submission route into ArrayExpress, alongside MAGE-TAB format-based pipelines. ArrayExpress is a stable and highly accessed resource. Our future tasks include automation of data flows and further integration with other EMBL-EBI resources for the representation of multi-omics data.
The Probability of a Computable Output from a Random Oracle

Consider a universal oracle Turing machine that prints a finite or an infinite binary sequence, based on the answers to the binary queries that it makes during the computation. We study the probability that this output is infinite and computable when the machine is given a random (in the probabilistic sense) stream of bits as the answers to its queries during an infinitary computation. Surprisingly, we find that these probabilities are the entire class of real numbers in (0,1) that can be written as the difference of two halting probabilities relative to the halting problem. In particular, there are universal Turing machines that produce a computable infinite output with probability exactly 1/2. Our results contrast a large array of facts (the most well-known being the randomness of Chaitin’s halting probability) that witness maximal initial segment complexity of probabilities associated with universal machines. Our proof uses recent advances in algorithmic randomness.
Lexical-semantic interpretation of language input in mathematical dialogs

Discourse in formal domains, such as mathematics, is characterized by a mixture of telegraphic natural language and embedded (semi-)formal symbolic mathematical expressions. Due to the lack of empirical data, little is known about the suitability of input analysis methods for mathematical discourse in a dialog setting. We present an input understanding method for a tutoring system teaching mathematical theorem proving. The adopted deep analysis strategy is motivated by the complexity of the language phenomena observed in a corpus collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. Our goal is a uniform input interpretation, in particular, considering different degrees of formality of natural language verbalizations.
Twenty years of breast cancer in Iran: downstaging without a formal screening program.

BACKGROUND breast cancer (BC) is the most common malignancy among Iranian women. Although the relative incidence of BC is low, the cause-specific mortality is much higher than developed countries. The present study surveyed the overall trend of BC in Tehran. PATIENTS AND METHODS all breast pathologic records were studied in five major hospitals in Tehran during three phases (1: 1985-1995; 2: 1996-2000; and 3: 2001-2005). Malignant cases were classified according to the tumor-node-metastasis classification. Data were compared across the study. RESULTS Of 9050 medical records from male and female patients with 'breast disease', 2946 females with BC were included. A significant increase in the diagnosis of palpable early BCs (stage II increased, stage III decreased) was observed between phases 1 and 2. A relative increases in stages 0 and I were noted between phases 3 and 2. Nevertheless, 76.8% of cases were T2 or higher and 65.3% had positive lymph nodes in the last phase. The proportion of patients with stage IIIb was increased in phase 3, despite the reduction in phase 2. CONCLUSIONS despite the relative improvement in the status of BC patients, the vast majority are diagnosed in advanced stages. Specific screening measures should be implemented in Iran.
Pamidronate reduces skeletal morbidity in women with advanced breast cancer and lytic bone lesions: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Protocol 18 Aredia Breast Cancer Study Group.

PURPOSE To assess whether pamidronate can reduce the frequency of skeletal morbidity in women with lytic bone metastases from breast cancer treated with hormone therapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Three hundred seventy-two women with breast cancer who had at least one lytic bone lesion and who were receiving hormonal therapy were randomized to receive 90 mg of pamidronate or placebo as a 2-hour intravenous infusion given in double-blind fashion every 4 weeks for 24 cycles. Patients were evaluated for skeletal complications: pathologic fractures, spinal cord compression, irradiation of or surgery on bone, or hypercalcemia. The skeletal morbidity rate (the ratio of the number of skeletal complications to the time on trial) was the primary efficacy variable. Bone pain, use of analgesics, quality of life, performance status, bone tumor response, and biochemical parameters were also evaluated. RESULTS One hundred eighty-two patients who received pamidronate and 189 who received placebo were assessable. The skeletal morbidity rate was significantly reduced at 12, 18, and 24 cycles in patients treated with 90 mg of pamidronate (P = .028, .023, and .008, respectively). At 24 cycles, the proportion of patients having had any skeletal complication was 56% in the pamidronate group and 67% in the placebo group (P = .027). The time to the first skeletal complication was longer for patients receiving pamidronate than for those given placebo (P = .049). There was no statistical difference in survival or in objective bone response rate. Pamidronate was well tolerated. CONCLUSION Treatment with 90 mg of pamidronate as a 2-hour intravenous infusion every 4 weeks in addition to hormonal therapy significantly reduces skeletal morbidity from osteolytic metastases.
Out-of-core coherent closed quasi-clique mining from large dense graph databases

Due to the ability of graphs to represent more generic and more complicated relationships among different objects, graph mining has played a significant role in data mining, attracting increasing attention in the data mining community. In addition, frequent coherent subgraphs can provide valuable knowledge about the underlying internal structure of a graph database, and mining frequently occurring coherent subgraphs from large dense graph databases has witnessed several applications and received considerable attention in the graph mining community recently. In this article, we study how to efficiently mine the complete set of coherent closed quasi-cliques from large dense graph databases, which is an especially challenging task due to the fact that the downward-closure property no longer holds. By fully exploring some properties of quasi-cliques, we propose several novel optimization techniques which can prune the unpromising and redundant subsearch spaces effectively. Meanwhile, we devise an efficient closure checking scheme to facilitate the discovery of closed quasi-cliques only. Since large databases cannot be held in main memory, we also design an out-of-core solution with efficient index structures for mining coherent closed quasi-cliques from large dense graph databases. We call this Cocain*. Thorough performance study shows that Cocain* is very efficient and scalable for large dense graph databases.
Citron-Kinase, A Protein Essential to Cytokinesis in Neuronal Progenitors, Is Deleted in the FlatheadMutant Rat

Cytokinesis is an essential step in neurogenesis, yet the mechanisms that control cytokinesis in the developing CNS are not well understood. The flathead ( fh) mutation in rat results in cytokinesis failure in neural progenitors followed by apoptosis and a dramatic reduction in CNS growth. Here we present evidence that the fh mutation is caused by a single base deletion in exon 1 of the gene encoding Citron-Kinase (CitronK). This base deletion causes a premature stop codon at the 27th codon in the N-terminal kinase domain of Citron-K, and Western blot and immunocytochemical analysis show that the Citron-K protein is absent in proliferative zones in fh/fh mutant embryos. We find that Citron-K protein is normally expressed along the ventricular zone (VZ) surface and localizes to cleavage furrows of both symmetrically and asymmetrically dividing progenitors. In addition, Citron-K colocalizes with RhoA at cleavage furrows in wild-type (wt) embryos, whereas RhoA expression is reduced at the VZ surface and is absent from many cytokinesis furrows in homozygous fh/fh mutants. These results, together with evidence from a recently described induced mutation in mice, indicate that the flathead mutation is in the Citron-K gene and that Citron-K may act with RhoA to ensure the progression of cytokinesis in neuronal progenitors.