Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Presenilin-Dependent Familial Alzheimer's Disease: Emphasis on Presenilin Substrate-Mediated Signaling and Synaptic Function

Mutations in PSEN genes, which encode presenilin proteins, cause familial early-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). Transgenic mouse models based on coexpression of familial AD-associated presenilin and amyloid precursor protein variants successfully mimic characteristic pathological features of AD, including plaque formation, synaptic dysfunction, and loss of memory. Presenilins function as the catalytic subunit of γ-secretase, the enzyme that catalyzes intramembraneous proteolysis of amyloid precursor protein to release β-amyloid peptides. Familial AD-associated mutations in presenilins alter the site of γ-secretase cleavage in a manner that increases the generation of longer and highly fibrillogenic β-amyloid peptides. In addition to amyloid precursor protein, γ-secretase catalyzes intramembrane proteolysis of many other substrates known to be important for synaptic function. This paper focuses on how various animal models have enabled us to elucidate the physiological importance of diverse γ-secretase substrates, including amyloid precursor protein and discusses their roles in the context of cellular signaling and synaptic function.
Uplink Scheduler and Admission Control for the IEEE 802.16 Standard

Although the IEEE 802.16 standard defines five service levels to support real-time and bandwidth demanding applications, admission control and scheduling mechanisms are not specified in the standard. This paper introduces an up-link scheduling algorithm and an admission control policy for IEEE 802.16 networks. The proposed solution is fully standard-compliant and can be easily implemented in the base station. Simulation results show that this solution is able to meet the QoS requirements of multimedia applications.
Serum tissue polypeptide-specific antigen (TPS): what is its diagnostic value?

in the text. Dr Kirkwood suggests that there are a number ‘errors’ in the editorial, but provides no evidence for the although there is a difference in our interpretations of the available data, which is incomplete. In the absence of the definitive re on E1690 it is reasonable to speculatethat stage migration and changes in surgical technique might explain the differen between the results and those of E1684. Dr Kirkwood points one such change in that twice as many patients had clinic negative unresected lymphatics in the later study. Only he appreciate the role, if any, of sentinel node biopsy until the E1 results are published. The editorial acknowledges that overall survival was improv by high-dose interferon (HDI) in the original study. Amongst t four sub-groups analysed in the trial report only patients with c ically apparent lymphadenopathy showed a statistically signific improvement in survival. It is fair to say that the group with clin cally negative histologically positive nodes was too small to all interpretation of interferon’s efficacy. However, to maintain th this is the population with the most to gain from HDI on the ba of a 34 patient sample is tenuous, and not a claim Dr Kirkwo made in the original report on E1684. We are agreed that HDI is active in melanoma, and that cr over salvage therapy is the most plausible explanation for
Some developmental aspects of sentence processing and memory

ABSTRACT Three groups of children, aged 5, 7 and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. The children listened to a story, which was interrupted at intervals during which they were asked to repeat verbatim the last sentence they heard. The test-sentences always consisted of two clauses: either of the main–main type, or of the main–subordinate or subordinate–main types. The prose material was also either normal prose, or semantically uninterpretable but syntactically normal prose. The results suggest a developmental sequence in which the youngest group's performance is dominated by semantic factors. They do not show the adult clause-memory effects, their recall is dominated by the main clause, and their recall of normal prose is not clausally segmented. The two older groups' performance more closely approximates that of adults.
The Economics of Implementing Traceability in Beef Supply Chains: Trends in Major Producing and Trading Countries

Countries have implemented traceability systems, especially after discovery of BSE in cattle, in order to quickly identify hazard sources. We compare the economic impacts of mandatory and voluntary systems in the EU, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and the United States in terms of the systems' breadth, depth, and precision.
Supporting Social Interaction in an Intelligent Collaborative Learning System

Students learning effectively in groups encourage each other to ask questions, explain and justify their opinions, articulate their reasoning, and elaborate and reflect upon their knowledge. The benefits of collaborative learning, however, are only achieved by active, well- functioning teams. This paper presents a model of collaborative learning designed to help an intelligent collaborative learning system identify and target group interaction problem areas. The model describes potential indicators of effective collaborative learning, and for each indicator, recommends strategies for improving peer interaction. This collaborative learning model drove the design and development of two tools that automate the coding, and aid the analysis of collaborative learning conversation and activity. Empirical evaluation of these tools confirm that effective learning teams are comprised of active participants who demand explanations and justification from their peers. The distribution of conversational skills used by members of a supportive group committed to their teammates' learning is compared to that of an unfocused, unsupportive group. The results suggest that structured, high-level knowledge of student conversation in context may be sufficient for automating the assessment of group interaction, furthering the possibility of an intelligent collaborative learning system that can support and enhance the group learning process.
Caliciviruses Differ in Their Functional Requirements for eIF4F Components*

Two classes of viruses, namely members of the Potyviridae and Caliciviridae, use a novel mechanism for the initiation of protein synthesis that involves the interaction of translation initiation factors with a viral protein covalently linked to the viral RNA, known as VPg. The calicivirus VPg proteins can interact directly with the initiation factors eIF4E and eIF3. Translation initiation on feline calicivirus (FCV) RNA requires eIF4E because it is inhibited by recombinant 4E-BP1. However, to date, there have been no functional studies carried out with respect to norovirus translation initiation, because of a lack of a suitable source of VPg-linked viral RNA. We have now used the recently identified murine norovirus (MNV) as a model system for norovirus translation and have extended our previous studies with FCV RNA to examine the role of the other eIF4F components in translation initiation. We now demonstrate that, as with FCV, MNV VPg interacts directly with eIF4E, although, unlike FCV RNA, translation of MNV RNA is not sensitive to 4E-BP1, eIF4E depletion, or foot-and-mouth disease virus Lb protease-mediated cleavage of eIF4G. We also demonstrate that both FCV and MNV RNA translation require the RNA helicase component of the eIF4F complex, namely eIF4A, because translation was sensitive (albeit to different degrees) to a dominant negative form and to a small molecule inhibitor of eIF4A (hippuristanol). These results suggest that calicivirus RNAs differ with respect to their requirements for the components of the eIF4F translation initiation complex.
Improving Quality of Service in MAC 802.11 Layer

Quality of service (QoS) in wireless 802.11 networks cannot be achieved without the support for service differentiation at the medium access layer. IEEE802.11 suffers from QoS limitations that have often been summarized in the literature. We present simulation results to show the effectiveness of several proposed techniques of improving the QoS in the IEEE802.11 protocol. Specifically, we closely examine the sliding contention window (SCW) technique and present a performance study that augments the work done by the original authors, by considering the determinism of QoS achieved. We find that simple approaches such as priority queuing and differential inter-frame spacing provide service differentiation at a single station but are not successful in providing it across a number of stations. Further, we find that the SCW approach provides a high service differentiation and deterministic QoS guarantees. It achieves these by a strict separation of the contention window range of different priority classes. Further, it measures and reacts to losses suffered by high priority flows at the MAC layer and to the increase in network load. These cross layer design techniques help SCW maintain good performance even at high network load. However, this strict service differentiation comes at the cost of reduced performance of low priority flows at heavy load.
Group averaging in the (p, q) oscillator representation of SL(2, R)

We investigate refined algebraic quantization with group averaging in a finite-dimensional constrained Hamiltonian system that provides a simplified model of general relativity. The classical theory has gauge group SL(2,R) and a distinguished o(p,q) observable algebra. The gauge group of the quantum theory is the double cover of SL(2,R), and its representation on the auxiliary Hilbert space is isomorphic to the (p,q) oscillator representation. When p⩾2, q⩾2 and p+q≡0 (mod 2), we obtain a physical Hilbert space with a nontrivial representation of the o(p,q) quantum observable algebra. For p=q=1, the system provides the first example known to us where group averaging converges to an indefinite sesquilinear form.
An integrated hardware/software approach for run-time scratchpad management

An ever increasing number of dynamic interactive applications are implemented on portable consumer electronics. Designers depend largely on operating systems to map these applications on the architecture. However, today's embedded operating systems abstract away the precise architectural details of the platform. As a consequence, they cannot exploit the energy efficiency of scratchpad memories. We present in this paper a novel integrated hardware/software solution to support scratchpad memories at a high abstraction level. We exploit hardware support to alleviate the transfer cost from/to the scratchpad memory and at the same time provide a high-level programming interface for run-time scratchpad management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a case-study.
Pest: from the lab to the classroom

Automated software verification is an active field of research which has made enormous progress both in theoretical and practical aspects. In recent years, an important effort has been put into applying these techniques on top of mainstream programming languages. These languages typically provide powerful features such as reflection, aliasing and polymorphism which are handy for practitioners but, in contrast, make verification a real challenge. The Pest programming language, on the other hand, was conceived with verifiability as one of its main design drivers. Although its main purpose is to serve as a test bed for new language features, its bare-bones syntax and strong support for annotations suggested early on in its development that it could also serve as a teaching tool for first-year undergraduate students. Developing an Eclipse plug-in for Pest proved to be both cost-effective and a key part to its adoption in the classroom. In this paper, we report on this experience.
Service-Providing Nonprofits Working in Coalition to Advocate for Policy Change

Nonprofit organizations that primarily provide social or health services can play an important role in policy advocacy, as indicated by recent research. Less is known about how and why they participate in policy advocacy, and concerns remain that their advocacy is overly self-interested. This case study of an urban immigrant health policy advocacy coalition made up primarily of service-providing nonprofits in New York City suggests that (a) service-providing nonprofits’ insights as daily case-level advocates for their clients generate unique contributions to policy change agendas, particularly at the policy implementation level rather than at the legislative level; (b) these organizations do not necessarily see a conflict between their organizational survival imperatives and social change objectives, nor between case-level and higher level advocacy; and (c) a coalition structure, leadership by an experienced advocacy organization, and dedicated foundation funding can elevate case advocacy concerns into a higher level and more sustained advocacy agenda.
Mechanical Therapy as a Potential Green Way to Attack Cancer Disease

Mechanical force is tightly connected to human health status, and the occurrence of disease can generally be ascribed to certain loss of force balance. However, the role of mechanical approaches in tumor therapy is largely neglected, while the currently available cancer prevention and treatment methods are generally either expensive or just cause too much side effect. In this article, we present a systematic interpretation on a promising strategy which was termed here as Mechanical Therapy for the first time based on the fact that mechanical force closely accompanies the whole life (growth and death) of a cell, and plays a crucial role in biological functions. In order to mold the mechanical force as a practical tool for cancer therapy, we expound the effects of the mechanical force related to the tumors from molecule to tissue level and evaluate its feasibility for treatment purpose. It can be conceived that given enough investigations, the mechanical therapy may generate big potential to open new windows for cancer prevention, relieving or even destroying if well administrated. As an easy going and convenient method, a systematic and thorough study of mechanical therapy may clarify more options for future clinical practices. Besides, when patients encounter various forces in daily life, they can at least identify the good or bad forces for a better and healthy life style based on the mechanisms thus disclosed.
Weighted 2-Motzkin Paths

This paper is motivated by two problems recently proposed by Coker on combinatorial identities related to the Narayana polynomials and the Catalan numbers. We find that a bijection of Chen, Deutsch and Elizalde can be used to provide combinatorial interpretations of the identities of Coker when it is applied to weighted plane trees. For the sake of presentation of our combinatorial correspondences, we provide a description of the bijection of Chen, Deutsch and Elizalde in a slightly different manner in the form of a direct construction from plane trees to 2-Motzkin paths without the intermediate step involving the Dyck paths.
Viscous Perturbations of Vorticity Conserving Flows andSeparatrix

We examine the eeect of the breaking of vorticity conservation by viscous dissipation on transport in the underlying uid ow. The transport of interest is between regimes of diierent characteristic motion and is aaorded by the splitting of separatrices. A base ow that is vorticity conserving is assumed therefore to have a separatrix that is either a homoclinic or a heteroclinic orbit. The corresponding vorticity dissipating ow, with small time-dependent forcing and viscous parameter ", maintains an O(") closeness to the inviscid ow in a weak sense. An appropriate Melnikov theory that allows for such weak perturbations is then developed. A surprisingly simple expression for the leading order distance between perturbed invariant (stable and unstable) manifolds is derived which depends only on the inviscid ow. Finally, the implications for transport in barotropic jets are discussed.
Quality Evaluation of Cone Biopsy Specimens Obtained by Large Loop Excision of the Transformation Zone

Background Large loop excision of the transformation zone (LLETZ) has been used for the diagnosis and treatment of precancerous cervical lesions, and it is the first choice of treatment in the majority of cervical pathology services. The aim of this study was to evaluate the presence of thermal artifacts, the need for serial sections, the percentage of clear and involved resection margins and the relationship between endocervical gland involvement and the severity of the lesion in samples resected using LLETZ. Methods A retrospective study was performed at Santa Casa de Misericordia School of Science (HSCMV), Vitoria, Espirito Santo, Brazil with a sample of 52 histopathology slides from patients submitted to conization because of abnormal cytology findings and a biopsy result of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) 2, CIN 3 and adenocarcinoma in situ. Statistical analysis was performed using Student’s t-test. Results Serial sections were required to confirm diagnosis in four of 52 cases. Thermal artifacts were present in all cases, with grade I being the most common (94.2% of cases). Clear margins were found in 96.2% of cases. No association was found between glandular involvement and CIN 1 (P > 0.05); however, there was an association with CIN 2 and CIN 3 (P < 0.05). Conclusion The amount of excised tissue was sufficient, thermal artifacts were slight, resection margins were clear in most of cases, and a possible association was found between glandular involvement and the severity of the lesion.
W-band noise radar in short range applications

Noise Radar Technology (NRT) uses noise waveforms (continuous or pulsed) as a radar signal and correlation processing of the returns for their optimal reception. This paper is devoted to some possible applications of NRT in civil field, in particular to millimetre-wave radars, with comparison of the use of Noise W-band radar versus the more classical FM-CW or pulse compression solutions.
New Diterpenoids from Soft Coral Sarcophyton ehrenbergi

Continuing chemical investigation on the acetone extracts of the soft coral Sarcophyton ehrenbergi collected off the coast of San-hsian-tai, Taitong County, Taiwan led to the isolation of two new diterpenoids, ehrenbergol C and acetyl ehrenberoxide B (1 and 2). The structures of these isolated metabolites were elucidated through extensive spectroscopic analyses. Moreover, in vitro tests show that compounds 1 and 2 displayed antiviral activity towards human cytomegalovirus, with EC50 of 20 and 8.0 µg/mL, respectively.
Zero clustering: an approach to extend zero compression to instruction caches

We propose an energy-efficient architecture for instruction caches that relies on dynamic zero compression (DZC), that is, the possibility of reading and writing a single bit for every zero-valued byte [5]. We enhance the basic DZC by using a simple bit permutation to increase the number of zero-valued bytes, so that the corresponding overhead is negligible. The derivation of an effective permutation relies on a heuristic zero clustering algorithm that is based on the knowledge of the memory reference access trace, thus making this solution suitable for application-specific embedded systems. The architecture proposed in this work makes possible the application of zero compression to instruction caches; experiments showed an increase of zero clusters of more than 70% on average, which translates into a 10% improvement in dynamic energy savings with respect to DZC.
Window-growth rateless coding for data-partitioned video in wireless environments

This paper maps channel codes at the application layer to data-partitioned video so that more important compressed data are protected in a closed-loop communication scheme. In particular, window-growth rateless codes are a priority-scalable form of Forward Error Correction that also provide incremental protection to streamed video. The paper introduces a detailed scheme for achieving this according to the H.264/AVC codec's picture types and structures. Consideration is given to the differing data-partitioning modes to establish the feasibility of the scheme for error-prone channels, with a demonstration for a wireless access channel that shows the utility of the scheme, which achieves several dB improvement in video quality (PSNR) through unequal protection compared to equal error protection.
Pair Multiplicities and Pulsar Death

Through a simple model of particle acceleration and pair creation above the polar caps of rotation-powered pulsars, we calculate the height of the pair formation front (PFF) and the dominant photon emission mechanism for the pulsars in the Princeton catalog. We find that for most low- and moderate-field pulsars, the height of the PFF and the final Lorentz factor of the primary beam is set by nonresonant inverse Compton scattering (NRICS), in the Klein-Nishina limit. NRICS is capable of creating pairs over a wide range of pulsar parameters without invoking a magnetic field more complicated than a centered dipole, although we still require a reduced radius of curvature for most millisecond pulsars. For short-period pulsars, the dominant process is curvature radiation, while for extremely high field pulsars, it is resonant inverse Compton scattering (RICS). The dividing point between NRICS dominance and curvature dominance is very temperature dependent; large numbers of pulsars dominated by NRICS at a stellar temperature of 106 K are dominated by curvature at 105 K. Our principle result is a new determination of the theoretical pulsar death line. Proper inclusion of ICS allows us to reach the conclusion that all known radio pulsars are consistent with pair creation above their polar caps, assuming steady acceleration of a space charge-limited particle beam. We identify a new region of the P- diagram where slow pulsars with narrow radiation beams should be found in sufficiently large surveys. We also show that the injection rate of electrons and positrons into the Crab Nebula inferred from the polar cap pair creation model at the present epoch (1039 electrons and positrons s-1) suffices to explain the nebular X-ray and γ-ray emission, the best empirical measure of the instantaneous particle-loss rate from any pulsar, but that the contemporary injection rate is about a factor of 5 below the rate averaged over the nebula's history required to explain the nebular radio emission (assuming that the nebular radio source is homogeneous). It is not clear whether this discrepancy can be resolved by evolutionary effects and by better treatment of nebular inhomogeneity or is an indication of another particle source in the pulsar's magnetosphere.
ENPCO: an entropy-based partition-codec algorithm to reduce power for bipartition-codec architecture in pipelined circuits

This work proposes a new algorithm to synthesize low power bipartition-codec architecture for pipelined circuits. The bipartition-codec architecture has been introduced as an effective power reduction technique for circuit design. The entropy-based partition-codec (ENPCO) algorithm extends this approach as it optimizes for both: power and area. It uses entropy as a criterion to balance between power and area. The ENPCO algorithm is composed of two phases: first, it clusters the output vectors with high occurrence into a group, moving all remaining output vectors into another group. The first group will be encoded in order to save power. Secondly, based on circuit entropy, output patterns are moved between both groups in order to balance power consumption and area overhead. A number of Microelectronic Center of North Carolina (MCNC) benchmarks were used to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm. Results demonstrate that ENPCO algorithm can achieve low power with less area overhead than the single-phase algorithm introduced previously by Shanq-Jang Ruan et al. (1999).