Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Island Fuzzy CoCo : Island Model-Based Coevolution of Fuzzy Systems

In Fuzzy CoCo, a cooperative coevolutionary approach to fuzzy modeling, two coevolving species are defined: database (membership functions) and rule base. However, finding an adequate rule-base size for a given problem is a hard task, usually tackled by running several, independent, instances of Fuzzy CoCo set to search for systems of different sizes. I propose in this paper an extension to Fuzzy CoCo that takes advantage of such parallel exploration, through a carefully conceived migration policy, to improve both global search capabilities and evolutionary dynamics with respect to simple Fuzzy CoCo.
Negotiating Multiplicity: Adaptive Asymmetries within Second-Generation Turks’ “Society of Mind”

If identities are socially produced, what happens when individuals grow up participating in divergent or conflicting social contexts? This article reports on research with second-generation Turkish adolescents in London. Using the concept of the dialogical self, the research examines the dialogical structure of these young Turks’ selves. The analysis is Bakhtinian and seeks to identify the different discourses through which these young Turks talk about themselves. Three distinct discourses, or I-positions, are identified. These are then related to the sociocultural context within which these youth live, and specific attention is given to the constraints on these youth in expressing aspects of their identity. We demonstrate that the asymmetries and tensions within these adolescents’ dialogical selves are adaptive to the fractured and asymmetrical social contexts in which they are embedded.
Draft Genomes of Anopheles cracens and Anopheles maculatus: Comparison of Simian Malaria and Human Malaria Vectors in Peninsular Malaysia

Anopheles cracens has been incriminated as the vector of human knowlesi malaria in peninsular Malaysia. Besides, it is a good laboratory vector of Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax. The distribution of An. cracens overlaps with that of An. maculatus, the human malaria vector in peninsular Malaysia that seems to be refractory to P. knowlesi infection in natural settings. Whole genome sequencing was performed on An. cracens and An. maculatus collected here. The draft genome of An. cracens was 395 Mb in size whereas the size of An. maculatus draft genome was 499 Mb. Comparison with the published Malaysian An. maculatus genome suggested the An. maculatus specimen used in this study as a different geographical race. Comparative analyses highlighted the similarities and differences between An. cracens and An. maculatus, providing new insights into their biological behavior and characteristics.
Leptin Reverts Pro-Apoptotic and Antiproliferative Effects of α-Linolenic Acids in BCR-ABL Positive Leukemic Cells: Involvement of PI3K Pathway

It is suspected that bone marrow (BM) microenvironmental factors may influence the evolution of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). In this study, we postulated that adipocytes and lipids could be involved in the progression of CML. To test this hypothesis, adipocytes were co-cultured with two BCR-ABL positive cell lines (PCMDS and K562). T cell (Jurkat) and stroma cell (HS-5) lines were used as controls. In the second set of experiments, leukemic cell lines were treated with stearic, oleic, linoleic or α-linolenic acids in presence or absence of leptin. Survival, proliferation, leptin production, OB-R isoforms (OB-Ra and OB-Rb), phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3k) and BCL-2 expression have been tested after 24h, 48h and 72h of treatment. Our results showed that adipocytes induced a decrease of CML proliferation and an increase in lipid accumulation in leukemic cells. In addition, CML cell lines induced adipocytes cell death. Chromatography analysis showed that BM microenvironment cells were full of saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated (MUFA) fatty acids, fatty acids that protect tumor cells against external agents. Stearic acid increased Bcl-2 expression in PCMDS, whereas oleic and linoleic acids had no effects. In contrast, α-linolenic acid decreased the proliferation and the survival of CML cell lines as well as BCL-2 and OB-R expression. The effect of α-linolenic acids seemed to be due to PI3K pathway and Bcl-2 inhibition. Leptin production was detected in the co-culture medium. In the presence of leptin, the effect of α-linolenic acid on proliferation, survival, OB-R and BCl-2 expression was reduced.
Vitamin B6 as add-on treatment in chronic schizophrenic and schizoaffective patients: a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

BACKGROUND Vitamin B6, or pyridoxine, plays an intrinsic role in the synthesis of certain neurotransmitters that take part in development of psychotic states. Several reports indicate that vitamin B6 may be a factor in a number of psychiatric disorders and related conditions, such as autism, Alzheimer's disease, hyperactivity, learning disability, anxiety disorder, and depression. Moreover, there are anecdotal reports of a reduction in psychotic symptoms after vitamin B6 supplementation of psychopharmacologic treatment of patients suffering from schizophrenia or organic mental disorder. The aim of this study was to examine whether vitamin B6 therapy influences psychotic symptoms in patients suffering from schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. METHOD The effects of the supplementation of vitamin B6 to antipsychotic treatment on positive and negative symptoms in 15 schizophrenic and schizoaffective patients (DSM-IV criteria) were examined in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study spanning 9 weeks. All patients had stable psychopathology for at least 1 month before entry into the study and were maintained on treatment with their prestudy psychoactive and antiparkinsonian medications throughout the study. All patients were assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) for schizophrenia on a weekly basis. Patients randomly received placebo or vitamin B6, starting at 100 mg/day in the first week and increasing to 400 mg/day in the fourth week by 100-mg increments each week. RESULTS PANSS scores revealed no differences between vitamin B6- and placebo-treated patients in amelioration of their mental state. CONCLUSION Further studies with larger populations and shorter duration of illness are needed to clarify the question of the possible efficacy of vitamin B6 in treatment of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia.
Can punishment maintain sex

Individuals who reproduce asexually have a two-fold advantage over their sexually-reproducing counterparts as they are able to reproduce twice as fast. Explaining why sexual reproduction is favoured over asexual reproduction therefore remains an important challenge in evolutionary biology. Various mechanisms involving resistance to parasites, adaptation to novel environments and helping to purge the genome of deleterious mutations have all been proposed as potential mechanisms which could promote the evolution of sex. A recent article has suggested that spiteful males may help to reduce the two-fold advantage of asexual females. Here I discuss this idea, and further ask whether punishment of asexual females by sexual females could be one way in which sexual reproduction could be maintained in groups of animals; in light of recent research on the repression of competition, it could be possible that asexual females which reproduce faster than their sexual counterparts will be punished for using group resources. It may therefore be possible that the behaviour of sexual individuals towards asexual females could have fitness consequences which could potentially reduce the two-fold advantage they gain from reproducing parthenogenetically.
Motor thalamus integration of cortical, cerebellar and basal ganglia information: implications for normal and parkinsonian conditions

Motor thalamus (Mthal) is implicated in the control of movement because it is strategically located between motor areas of the cerebral cortex and motor-related subcortical structures, such as the cerebellum and basal ganglia (BG). The role of BG and cerebellum in motor control has been extensively studied but how Mthal processes inputs from these two networks is unclear. Specifically, there is considerable debate about the role of BG inputs on Mthal activity. This review summarizes anatomical and physiological knowledge of the Mthal and its afferents and reviews current theories of Mthal function by discussing the impact of cortical, BG and cerebellar inputs on Mthal activity. One view is that Mthal activity in BG and cerebellar-receiving territories is primarily “driven” by glutamatergic inputs from the cortex or cerebellum, respectively, whereas BG inputs are modulatory and do not strongly determine Mthal activity. This theory is steeped in the assumption that the Mthal processes information in the same way as sensory thalamus, through interactions of modulatory inputs with a single driver input. Another view, from BG models, is that BG exert primary control on the BG-receiving Mthal so it effectively relays information from BG to cortex. We propose a new “super-integrator” theory where each Mthal territory processes multiple driver or driver-like inputs (cortex and BG, cortex and cerebellum), which are the result of considerable integrative processing. Thus, BG and cerebellar Mthal territories assimilate motivational and proprioceptive motor information previously integrated in cortico-BG and cortico-cerebellar networks, respectively, to develop sophisticated motor signals that are transmitted in parallel pathways to cortical areas for optimal generation of motor programmes. Finally, we briefly review the pathophysiological changes that occur in the BG in parkinsonism and generate testable hypotheses about how these may affect processing of inputs in the Mthal.
Generation and Amplification of Tunable Multicolored Femtosecond Laser Pulses by Using Cascaded Four-Wave Mixing in Transparent Bulk Media

We have reviewed the generation and amplification of wavelength-tunable multicolored femtosecond laser pulses using cascaded four-wave mixing (CFWM) in transparent bulk media, mainly concentrating on our recent work. Theoretical analysis and calculations based on the phase-matching condition could explain well the process semi-quantitatively. The experimental studies showed: (1) as many as fifteen spectral up-shifted and two spectral down-shifted sidebands were obtained simultaneously with spectral bandwidth broader than 1.8 octaves from near ultraviolet (360 nm) to near infrared (1.2 μm); (2) the obtained sidebands were spatially separated well and had extremely high beam quality with M2 factor better than 1.1; (3) the wavelengths of the generated multicolor sidebands could be conveniently tuned by changing the crossing angle or simply replacing with different media; (4) as short as 15-fs negatively chirped or nearly transform limited 20-fs multicolored femtosecond pulses were obtained when one of the two input beams was negatively chirped and the other was positively chirped; (5) the pulse energy of the sideband can reach a μJ level with power stability better than 1% RMS; (6) broadband two-dimensional (2-D) multicolored arrays with more than ten periodic columns and more than ten rows were generated in a sapphire plate; (7) the obtained sidebands could be simultaneously spectra broadened and power amplified in another bulk medium by using cross-phase modulation (XPM) in conjunction with four-wave optical parametric amplification (FOPA). The characterization showed that this is interesting and the CFWM sidebands generated by this novel method have good enough qualities in terms of power stability, beam quality, and temporal features suited to various experiments such as ultrafast multicolor time-resolved spectroscopy and multicolor-excitation nonlinear microscopy.
Mechanical unfolding of covalently linked GroES: Evidence of structural subunit intermediates

It is difficult to determine the structural stability of the individual subunits or protomers of many proteins in the cell that exist in an oligomeric or complexed state. In this study, we used single‐molecule force spectroscopy on seven subunits of covalently linked cochaperonin GroES (ESC7) to evaluate the structural stability of the subunit. A modified form of ESC7 was immobilized on a mica surface. The force‐extension profile obtained from the mechanical unfolding of this ESC7 showed a distinctive sawtooth pattern that is typical for multimodular proteins. When analyzed according to the worm‐like chain model, the contour lengths calculated from the peaks in the profile suggested that linked‐GroES subunits unfold in distinct steps after the oligomeric ring structure of ESC7 is disrupted. The evidence that structured subunits of ESC7 withstand external force to some extent even after the perturbation of the oligomeric ring structure suggests that a stable monomeric intermediate is an important component of the equilibrium unfolding reaction of GroES.
Design space for focus+context navigation in web forms

Navigation in long forms commonly employs user interface design patterns such as scrolling, tabs, and wizard steps. Since these patterns hide contextual form fields outside the viewport or behind other tabs or pages, we propose to apply the focus+context principle from information visualization to form design. This work presents a design space analysis to support usability engineering of focus+context form navigation. We evaluated the design space's usefulness and applicability in a case study and found the design space has fostered creativity and helped to clearly document design decisions, indicating it can be a valuable support for engineering intelligent, form-based user interfaces.
Sindbis virus as a model for studies of conformational changes in a metastable virus and the role of conformational changes in in vitro antibody neutralisation

Sindbis virus has long been the prototypical alphavirus used in the study of assembly of icosahedral viruses which contain membranes. Much is known about the assembly pathway and molecular architecture of this virus, and models of mechanisms of infection and release of the viral RNA have been proposed. This review will focus on the structural aspects of in vitro antibody neutralisation of a metastable alphavirus, Sindbis virus, which results from antibody induced conformational changes. For the alphaviruses, structures of in vitro antibody induced conformational neutralisation for Sindbis virus, and receptor occlusion for Sindbis and Ross River virus (RRV) have been reported. A model is presented which could extend the mechanism of antibody induced conformational neutralisation to any metastable virus structure. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Real time Continuous AR parameter estimation from randomly sampled observations

In this paper, a real-time CAR (Continuous AR) parameter estimation method from randomly sampled observations is presented. For this purpose, a new concept is introduced: the Pseudo Correlation Vector. This vector, which is equal to the Correlation Vector in the uniform sampling case, reflects the statistical dependencies between successive values of the CAR signal. As a matter of fact, being the limit of a series recursively related to the observations, its real-time estimation becomes especially easy. An inversion of its dependence on the CAR parameters leads then to an estimate of the latter. Theoretical and simulation results regarding the proposed estimator are given.
Closed-loop control of a human Center-Of-Pressure position based on somatosensory feedback

Supplementary visual, audio and tactile inputs have been shown to enhance postural control. In particular the light touch on a stable surface has been proven to significantly increase postural stability. Furthermore, it has been reported that the Center of Pressure (CoP) can be sinusoidally driven thanks to somatosensory inputs. In this paper, these results are extended to improve balance control. A closed loop control of the CoP position based on somatosensory feedback is developed. This control strategy allows both setpoint tracking and path following of the CoP. The effectiveness of the proposed somatosensory feedback is assessed through experiments involving 11 naive subjects.
Transfer learning for high resolution aerial image classification

With rapid developments in satellite and sensor technologies, increasing amount of high spatial resolution aerial images have become available. Classiﬁcation of these images are important for many remote sensing image understanding tasks, such as image retrieval and object detection. Meanwhile, image classiﬁcation in the computer vision ﬁeld is revolutionized with recent popularity of the convolutional neural networks (CNN), based on which the state-of-the-art classiﬁcation results are achieved. Therefore, the idea of applying the CNN for high resolution aerial image classiﬁcation is straightforward. However, it is not trivial mainly because the amount of labeled images in remote sensing for training a deep neural network is limited. As a result, transfer learning techniques were adopted for this problem, where the CNN used for the classiﬁcation problem is pre-trained on a larger dataset beforehand. In this paper, we propose a speciﬁc ﬁne-tuning strategy that results in better CNN models for aerial image classiﬁcation. Extensive experiments were carried out using the proposed approach with different CNN architectures. Our proposed method shows competitive results compared to the existing approaches, indicating the superiority of the proposed ﬁne-tuning algorithm.
Radio Vortex–Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Communication Systems With High Capacity

As a potential technique to improve channel capacity, orbital angular momentum has been developed in the radio field. In this paper, a novel radio vortex-multiple-input multiple-output (RV-MIMO) system is proposed to provide high capacity in free space. In particular, the vortex channel of the proposed system is modeled. Based on this model, the optimal vortex phase is derived, which results in the optimal capacity of the proposed RV-MIMO system. Simulation results show that the proposed RV-MIMO system could achieve higher capacity than the MIMO system in free space.
Differential Binding Regulation of Microtubule-associated Proteins MAP1A, MAP1B, and MAP2 by Tubulin Polyglutamylation*

The major neuronal post-translational modification of tubulin, polyglutamylation, can act as a molecular potentiometer to modulate microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) binding as a function of the polyglutamyl chain length. The relative affinity of Tau, MAP2, and kinesin has been shown to be optimal for tubulin modified by ∼3 glutamyl units. Using blot overlay assays, we have tested the ability of polyglutamylation to modulate the interaction of two other structural MAPs, MAP1A and MAP1B, with tubulin. MAP1A and MAP2 display distinct behavior in terms of tubulin binding; they do not compete with each other, even when the polyglutamyl chains of tubulin are removed, indicating that they have distinct binding sites on tubulin. Binding of MAP1A and MAP1B to tubulin is also controlled by polyglutamylation and, although the modulation of MAP1B binding resembles that of MAP2, we found that polyglutamylation can exert a different mode of regulation toward MAP1A. Interestingly, although the affinity of the other MAPs tested so far decreases sharply for tubulins carrying long polyglutamyl chains, the affinity of MAP1A for these tubulins is maintained at a significant level. This differential regulation exerted by polyglutamylation toward different MAPs might facilitate their selective recruitment into distinct microtubule populations, hence modulating their functional properties.
High-Resolution In Vivo Imaging of the Neurovascular Unit during Spreading Depression

Spreading depression (SD) is a propagating wave of neuronal depolarization and ionic shifts, seen in stroke and migraine. In vitro, SD is associated with astrocytic [Ca2+] waves, but it is unclear what role they play and whether they influence cerebral blood flow, which is altered in SD. Here we show that SD in vivo is associated with [Ca2+] waves in astrocytes and neurons and with constriction of intracortical arterioles severe enough to result in arrest of capillary perfusion. The vasoconstriction is correlated with fast astrocytic [Ca2+] waves and is inhibited when they are reduced. [Ca2+] waves appear in neurons before astrocytes, and inhibition of astrocytic [Ca2+] waves does not depress SD propagation. This suggests that astrocytes do not drive SD propagation but are responsible for the hemodynamic failure seen deep in the cortex. Similar waves occur in anoxic depolarizations (AD), supporting the notion that SD and AD are related processes.
Holographic versatile disc

The future of optical-disks is the HVD (Holographic versatile disk). It's an ultimate capacity is 3.9 Terabytes. Holography is a method of recording patterns of light (hologram) to produce a three-dimensional object. A hologram is created by using a laser beam. It uses red (650nm) and green (532nm) laser. To write on HVD, the information is decoded into binary data(ones & zero's) to be stored on spatial light modulator (SLM). The laser beam is splited into two by beam spliter. The reference beam is directed away from SLM. The information beam is directed through SLM and it carry its image. These beams rejoins to create a pattern of light interference (Holographic data) to the photopolymer disc and store it as hologram. To read data from HVD, a laser projects a light beam on to the hologram. It diffracts this beam according to specific patterns of stored hologram and produces a reconstruction beam that recreates the image of the page data and bounces off the disc and travels to CMOS sensor represents the page data. Its transfer rate is 1GB/sec. Its size is about 4.7inches and it stores 830 times more than DVD, 160 times more than single-sided Blu-ray, 20 times more than double-sided Blu-ray. It can store huge database at an affordable cost.
Image partitioning using system characteristics in heterogeneous computing systems

Many image processing tasks can be computed efficiently in a single program multiple data (SPMD) fashion on massively parallel systems. Although executing SPMD tasks on coarse-grained heterogeneous systems yields a cost-effective solution, heterogeneity introduces more complexity in data partitioning, mapping, and scheduling problems. In this paper, three image data partitioning schemes for parallel image processing in heterogeneous systems are investigated and implemented using the parallel virtual machine message passing library. The partitioning schemes are based on the system characteristics (processing capability) incorporated within the distributed computing primitives (DCP) environment using SpecInt92 benchmark and our DCP-based benchmark. We compare the results with the baseline (Eq-based) scheme that equally partitions images regardless of processing speed. The results from the experiments show that the DCP-based partitioning scheme outperforms the Eq-based and Spec-based schemes.