Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MWEs and Topic Modelling: Enhancing Machine Learning with Linguistics

Topic modelling is a popular approach to joint clustering of documents and terms, e.g. via Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The standard document representation in topic modelling is a bag of unigrams, ignoring both macro-level document structure and micro-level constituent structure. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on consolidating the micro-level document representation with multiword expressions, and present experimental results which demonstrate that linguistically-richer document representations enhance topic modelling.
Inhibition of Ras-guanine nucleotide-releasing factor 1 (Ras-GRF1) signaling in the striatum reverts motor symptoms associated with l-dopa–induced dyskinesia

l-dopa–induced dyskinesia (LID) is a common debilitating complication of dopamine replacement therapy in Parkinson's disease. Recent evidence suggests that LID may be linked causally to a hyperactivation of the Ras–ERK signaling cascade in the basal ganglia. We set out to determine whether specific targeting of Ras-guanine nucleotide-releasing factor 1 (Ras-GRF1), a brain-specific activator of the Ras–ERK pathway, may provide a therapy for LID. On the rodent abnormal involuntary movements scale, Ras-GRF1–deficient mice were significantly resistant to the development of dyskinesia during chronic l-dopa treatment. Furthermore, in a nonhuman primate model of LID, lentiviral vectors expressing dominant negative forms of Ras-GRF1 caused a dramatic reversion of dyskinesia severity leaving intact the therapeutic effect of l-dopa. These data reveal the central role of Ras-GRF1 in governing striatal adaptations to dopamine replacement therapy and validate a viable treatment for LID based on intracellular signaling modulation.
A new locus for Parkinson's disease (PARK8) maps to chromosome 12p11.2–q13.1

We performed genomewide linkage analysis of a Japanese family with autosomal dominant parkinsonism, which exhibits clinical features compatible with those of common Parkinson's disease. Parametric two‐point linkage analysis yielded a highest log odds (LOD) score of 4.32 at D12S345 (12p11.21). Parametric multipoint linkage analysis of the 13.6cM interval around this marker yielded LOD scores almost uniformly of >4.0 with a Zmax of 4.71 at D12S85 (12q12). Haplotype analysis detected two obligate recombination events at D12S1631 and D12S339 and defined the disease‐associated haplotype in the 13.6cM interval in 12p11.2–q13.1. This haplotype was shared by all the patients and by some unaffected carriers, suggesting that disease penetration in this family is incomplete. This low penetrance suggests that environmental or other genetic factors modify expression of the disease. Nonparametric two‐point and multipoint linkage analyses, which are penetrance‐independent, yielded Zmax LOD scores of 14.2 and 24.9 at D12S345, respectively, strongly supporting the mapping of the parkinsonism locus in this family to 12p11.23–q13.11. This chromosome region is different from any known locus for hereditary parkinsonism, in keeping with the unique genetic features of the parkinsonism in this family. The nomenclature of PARK8 was assigned to the new locus.
A phase I study of paclitaxel, etoposide, and cisplatin in extensive stage small cell lung cancer.

This Phase I study was designed to determine the maximally tolerated dose (MTD) of paclitaxel with standard doses of cisplatin and etoposide for patients with untreated extensive stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Secondary objectives were to determine the toxicities, response rate, response duration, and overall survival in this cohort. Twenty-eight SCLC patients were enrolled into four dose levels. All patients received a fixed dose of cisplatin at 80 mg/m2, i.v. , day 1. The first group received etoposide 50 mg/m2, i.v. day 1 and 100 mg/m2 p.o. , days 2-3, whereas all subsequent groups received etoposide 80 mg/m2, i.v. , day 1 and 160 mg/m2, p.o. , days 2-3. The paclitaxel starting dose was 135 mg/m2, i.v. , over a 3-h period and was escalated to 175 and 200 mg/m2. Cycles were repeated every 21 days for a maximum of six cycles. Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor was not given prophylactically but was allowed in subsequent cycles according to the American Society of Clinical Oncologists guidelines. All 28 SCLC patients were evaluable for toxicity, and 23 patients were evaluable for response. Myelosuppression was the major toxicity, with grade 4 neutropenia occurring in 23 of 28 patients (82%), but febrile neutropenia was uncommon and developed in 4 patients (14%). Grade 4 thrombocytopenia and anemia were rare, occurring as isolated events in one patient each. Dose-limiting peripheral neuropathy was observed at a paclitaxel dose of 200 mg/m2. Grade 4 nausea/vomiting and diarrhea were also noted at this dose level. Five patients had complete responses (22%), and 14 patients had partial responses (61%). The overall response rate was 83% with a median time to progression of 7.5 months, a median survival of 10 months, and a 1-year survival rate of 39%. This three-drug combination of paclitaxel with cisplatin and etoposide is active with acceptable toxicity. Neurotoxicity was dose limiting at 200 mg/m2 of paclitaxel. Neutropenia was frequent but not associated with significant morbidity. The recommended doses for future clinical trials are 175 mg/m2 paclitaxel, i.v. , over a 3-h period on day 1 with 80 mg/m2 cisplatin, i.v. , on day 1 and 80 mg/m2 etoposide, i.v. , on day 1 and 160 mg/m2 p.o. on days 2 and 3 with growth factor support. The Southwestern Oncology Group has instituted a Phase II study with this dose schedule.
Going beyond Paxos

Flash storage is making inroads into data centers, enabling a new class of applications that require persistence as well as extreme performance. Clusters of flash can satisfy millions of IOs per second at submillisecond latencies while consuming significantly less power per IO than disk clusters. Unfortunately, current designs for scalable storage systems are predicated on the properties of hard disks, and can be inefficient or unreliable when used with flash clusters. For example, replacing hard disks in high-end servers with expensive PCI-E flash drives (e.g., Fusion-io [10]) can result in a rigid architecture which is hard to scale incrementally and may be susceptible to network bottlenecks. Furthermore, scaling techniques such as data partitioning (e.g., FAWN [2]) can age drives at difference rates, resulting in uneven reliability and performance across the cluster. The upshot is that new abstractions are required to fully realize the potential of flash clusters. Accordingly, Corfu1 is a new storage system for flash clusters. The key idea in Corfu is to expose a cluster of network-attached flash devices as a single, shared log to clients running within the data center. Applications running on the clients can append data to this log or read entries from its middle. Internally, this shared log is implemented as a distributed log spread over the flash cluster. This design makes sense for two reasons:
Location Aware Data Aggregation for Efficient Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

An intelligent location-aware data aggregation mechanism for real-time observation, estimation, and efficient dissemination of any kind of traffic information in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is presented in this paper. The mechanism introduces a location awareness algorithm, enabling spatiotemporal database indexing and providing the location context of the messages without the use of advanced positioning systems such as satellite navigation and digital maps. Intelligent passive clustering and adaptive broadcasting are used to minimize the number of messages exchanged, packet collisions, and network load. The incoming messages are fused by a Kalman filter, allowing the description of the traffic-related information as a system characterized by as many variables as needed, depending on the application design. The scheme allows the comparison of aggregates and single observations, which enables their merging and better overall accuracy. Old information in aggregates is removed by real-time database refreshing, thus leaving only newer relevant information for the driver to make real-time decisions in traffic. The mechanism is generic and can be used for any kind of VANET information. It is evaluated by extensive simulations to show the efficiency and accuracy.
Technophilia vs. Technophobia: A Preliminary Look at Why Second-Language Teachers Do or Do Not Use Technology in Their Classrooms

Given the increasing pressure exerted by technological developments on education, it is important to understand the perceived ‘technophobia’ of teachers and to determine whether fear is the underlying factor behind their decisions regarding technology. Oral interviews were conducted with 10 L2 teachers and analyzed for their content in light of the following questions: (1) What are the reasons behind L2 teachers' decisions to use technology for teaching? (2) Why do some L2 teachers choose not to use computers in their teaching? (3) What factors influence these decisions? The main reasons are related to the teacher's personal belief in technology's benefits, or lack thereof, rather than to a resistance to technology. This finding suggests that teachers are not really ‘technophobic’ and that institutions are perhaps overly ‘technophilic’ in their rush to obtain the latest innovations without considering the needs of teachers and students.
Glut4 Is Upregulated despite Decreased Insulin Signaling during Prolonged Fasting in Northern Elephant Seal Pups All Procedures Were Reviewed and Approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of Both the University of California

Glut4 is upregulated despite decreased insulin signaling during prolonged fasting in northern elephant seal pups. glucose uptake is dependent on an insulin-signaling cascade in muscle and adipose tissue, resulting in the translocation of the insulin-dependent glucose transporter 4 (Glut4) into the plasma membrane. Additionally, extended food deprivation is characterized by suppressed insulin signaling and decreased Glut4 expression. Northern elephant seals are adapted to prolonged fasts characterized by high levels of plasma glucose. To address the hypothesis that the fasting-induced decrease in insulin is associated with reduced insulin signal-ing in prolonged fasted seals, we compared the adipose protein levels of the cellular insulin-signaling pathway, Glut4 and plasma glucose, insulin, cortisol, and adiponectin concentrations between Early (n ϭ 9; 2–3 wks postweaning) and Late (n ϭ 8; 6 – 8 wks postweaning) fasted seals. Plasma adiponectin (230 Ϯ 13 vs. 177 Ϯ 11 ng/ml), insulin (2.7 Ϯ 0.4 vs. 1.0 Ϯ 0.1 ␮U/ml), and glucose (9.8 Ϯ 0.5 vs. 8.0 Ϯ 0.3 mM) decreased, while cortisol (124 Ϯ 6 vs. 257 Ϯ 30 nM) doubled with fasting. Glut4 increased (31%) with fasting despite the significant decreases in the cellular content of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase as well as phosphorylated insulin receptor, insulin receptor substrate-1, and Akt2. Increased Glut4 may have contributed to the decrease in plasma glucose, but the decrease in insulin and insulin signaling suggests that Glut4 is not insulin-dependent in adipose tissue during prolonged fasting in elephant seals. The reduction of plasma glucose independent of insulin may make these animals an ideal model for the study of insulin resistance. REGARDLESS OF AGE OR gender, the northern elephant seal (Mir-ounga angustirostris) endures a 2–3 mo fast twice a year as a natural component of its life history (21, 24). Unlike hiberna-tors, which can experience similar bouts of food deprivation but conserve energy by lowering their metabolic rate and core body temperature (26), fasting seals remain normothermic and metabolically active during their prolonged fasts (8, 35). Fasting seals remain physically active as well, with males using their time on land to form and defend harems, with females giving birth to and nursing newborn pups, and with postweaning pups developing the diving ability they will need when they go out to sea, all the while completely abstaining from food or water. Fasting elephant seals rely primarily on the oxidation of their extensive fat stores to meet ϳ90 –95% of their energy requirements and maintain high …
Gender diversity in management: curvilinear relationships to reconcile findings

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of gender diversity (in executive boards and top management) on firm performance. To reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous studies, competing curvilinear relationships are theorized between gender diversity on boards and firm performance based on different theoretical backgrounds.Design/methodology/approach – The paper comprises a literature review and development of theoretical propositions.Findings – Curvilinear relationships were developed that may integrate different theoretical perspectives.Research limitations/implications – This paper provides theoretical support to reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous theoretical perspectives and empirical studies by proposing that competing recommendations from theoretical perspectives could be tested through curvilinear relationships.Practical implications – The propositions provide a strong argument for having more women in top management po.
Exploiting virtualization for delivering cloud-based IPTV services

Cloud computing is a new infrastructure environment that delivers on the promise of supporting on-demand services in a flexible manner by scheduling bandwidth, storage and compute resources on the fly. IPTV services like Video On Demand (VoD) and Live broadcast TV requires substantial bandwidth and compute resources to meet the real time requirements and to handle the very bursty resource requirements for each of these services. To meet the needs of the bursts of requests, each with a deadline constraint for both VoD and LiveTV channel changes, we propose a resource provisioning framework that allows these services to co-exist on a common infrastructure by taking advantage of virtualization. We propose an optimal algorithm that provides the minimum number of servers needed to fulfill all requests for these services. We prove this optimality in a general setting for any number of services with general deadline constraints. By using real world data from an operational IPTV environment, our results show that anticipating and thereby enabling the delaying of VoD requests by up to 30 seconds gives significant resource savings even under conservative environmental assumptions. We also experiment with different scenarios (by varying the deadline constraints, changing the peak to average ratios of the constituent services) to compute the overall savings.
Simultaneous Encryption/Compression of Images Using Alpha Rooting

Summary form only given. Significant work has been performed on encrypting images and compressing images as two separate problems, but traditional encryption techniques generally degrade the compression ratio. To circumvent these issues, two methods have been used. The first employs known encryption algorithms on compressed image data. The second develops compression algorithms which work well for encrypted data. The contribution of this paper is using alpha rooting to perform simultaneous compression and encryption. This achieves improved compression performance in terms of computational complexity and compression ratio. Results are shown for 2 of the well known benchmark images, using the well known JPEG image compression standard to demonstrate the effectiveness of alpha rooting for simultaneous encryption and compression.
Mining online text

Natural-language applications, such as machine translation, speech recognition, information retrieval, and summarization, are reaching a broader range of users today. Anyone who has used these products knows how imperfect they are. Still, people use them because they are desperate for ways to organize and sift through the vast amount of information available to them—textually— online. In addition, vast online texts are a potential gold mine of linguistic information for natural language processing (NLP) application builders to improve the quality of their systems. Building mining apps in natural language processing poses special challenges, but also offers great rewards. NLP problems, like most in AI, require large amounts of formally codified knowledge, that is, knowledge about words, parts of speech, grammar, word meanings, phonetics, text structure, and the world itself. For small or circumscribed domains, this knowledge can be typed in manually , but for general-purpose programs (the kind that most users want), the amount of knowledge is overwhelming. The quest for automating or semiautomating the acquisition of NLP knowledge has recently spawned a collection of new techniques that sometimes go under the heading " statistical NLP. " The phrase is not a particularly good one, as it seems to exclude approaches that do not use statistical frequency counting or probability theory. But it is brief and commonly used. The type of research described here might more broadly be called " automated or semiautomated knowledge acquisition from linguistic resources. " Let's begin with a straightforward example. Languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Russian lack the small words we call articles (a, an, the).
A Study of Thermistor Performance within a Textile Structure

Textiles provide an ideal structure for embedding sensors for medical devices. Skin temperature measurement is one area in which a sensor textile could be particularly beneficial; pathological skin is normally very sensitive, making the comfort of anything placed on that skin paramount. Skin temperature is an important parameter to measure for a number of medical applications, including for the early detection of diabetic foot ulcer formation. To this end an electronic temperature-sensor yarn was developed by embedding a commercially available thermistor chip into the fibres of a yarn, which can be used to produce a textile or a garment. As part of this process a resin was used to encapsulate the thermistor. This protects the thermistor from mechanical and chemical stresses, and also allows the sensing yarn to be washed. Building off preliminary work, the behaviour and performance of an encapsulated thermistor has been characterised to determine the effect of encapsulation on the step response time and absolute temperature measurements. Over the temperature range of interest only a minimal effect was observed, with step response times varying between 0.01–0.35 s. A general solution is presented for the heat transfer coefficient compared to size of the micro-pod formed by the encapsulation of the thermistor. Finally, a prototype temperature-sensing sock was produced using a network of sensing yarns as a demonstrator of a system that could warn of impending ulcer formation in diabetic patients.
Segmentation de catégories d objets par combinaison d'un modèle d'apparence et d'un champs de Markov

Nous nous interessons ici a la segmentation de categories d'objets dans des images. Si les modeles d'apparence par sac-de-mots sont ceux qui donnent a ce jour les meilleures performances en termes de classification d'image et de localisation d'objets, ils ne permettent pas de localiser precisement les frontieres des objets. Cela vient du fait que les objets ne sont consideres que comme des collections non structurees d'informations eparses. Parallelement, les modeles bases sur des champs de Markov (MRF) utilises pour la segmentation d'images se basent essentiellement sur les frontieres et permettent une regularisation spatiale, mais utilisent difficilement des contraintes globales liees aux objets, ce qui est indispensable lorsqu'on travaille avec des categories d'objets dont l'apparence peut varier significativement dune instance a l'autre. La principale contribution de cet article est la combinaison elegante de ces deux approches. Notre approche comporte un mecanisme base sur la detection d'objets par sac-de-mots produisant une segmentation grossiere des images, et simultanement, un second mecanisme, lui base sur un MRF, produit des segmentations propres. Ce second mecanisme est guide a la fois par des indices locaux de l'image (couleur, texture et arretes) et par des dependances a plus large echelle, donnees par le modele sac-de-mots qui renforcent la consistance entre les labels. Des experiences sur les bases Pascal VOC 2006 et Graz-02 montrent des resultats impressionnants dans le contexte difficile de la segmentation de categories d'objets en presence de fonds encombres et de larges changements de points de vue.
ULTRASTRUCTURAL LOCALIZATION OF CYTOCHROME b 5 ON RAT LIVER MICROSOMES BY MEANS OF HYBRID ANTIBODIES LABELED WITH FERRITIN

Subfractionation by density equilibration and by differential sedimentation in density gradients has resolved rat liver microsomes into several populations of subcellular components characterized by specific marker enzymes (1, 7). Vesicles derived from endoplasmic reticulum (ER) 1 were found to be heterogeneous, both in their physical characteristics and in their enzyme content. On the basis of these results, E R enzymes have been classified into two groups. Group b includes cytochromes b~ and P 450, and other oxidoreductases related to these hemoproteins; group c includes glucose 6-phosphatase, several other microsomal hydrolases, and glucuronyltransferase. With respect to enzymes of group b, those of group c sediment faster and equilibrate at higher densities in various gradients (1, 7). Furthermore, their
The C677T Polymorphism in MTHFR Is Not Associated with Migraine in Portugal

Migraine is a debilitating disorder affecting a large proportion of the population. The effect of methylenetrathydrofolate reductase (GeneID: 4524) polymorphisms in migraine etiology and development has been a theme of great interest. Several populations were evaluated with contradictory results. In this case-control study, we investigated the effect of the C677T polymorphism in MTHFR, as a genetic risk factor for migraine, in the Portuguese population. We observed that, overall, there was no significant difference in the frequencies of MTHFR C677T genotypes or of the T-allele among the Portuguese migraineurs when compared to controls. There was also no association of migraine with aura with MTHFR genotypes or with the T-allele, in contrast with previous studies. Regarding the risk of the T-allele homozygote carriers, there was an equal probability to develop migraine with aura over migraine without aura in our patients. Thus, we conclude that the C677T MTHFR polymorphism, responsible for a reduction of the MTHFR activity in folate metabolism, is not a major genetic susceptibility factor for migraine in the Portuguese population.
The rocky road to privatization

Abstract. Three main types of privatization are found in the United States: (1) lower proportion of Gross National Product preempted by the public sector, leaving correspondingly more for the private sector, (2) transferring present government enterprises to private organizations; and (3) contracting out the production and delivery of services financed by public funds. Most discussions of “contracting out,” which come from the “public choice” school of economics and public administration, mainly emphasize theoretical economic advantages. They also suppose that the practice can eradicate political machinations. In contrast, this evaluation takes into account the practices’intensely political environment. Many of the advantages attributed to contracting out often are not realized. The practice in many cases can save money. But successes are likely to be achieved only with projects meeting certain narrow specifications.