Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reflectivity and topography of cells grown on glass-coverslips measured with phase-shifted laser feedback interference microscopy

In spite of the advantages associated with the molecular specificity of fluorescence imaging, there is still a significant need to augment these approaches with label-free imaging. Therefore, we have implemented a form of interference microscopy based upon phase-shifted, laser-feedback interferometry and developed an algorithm that can be used to separate the contribution of the elastically scattered light by sub-cellular structures from the reflection at the coverslip-buffer interface. The method offers an opportunity to probe protein aggregation, index of refraction variations and structure. We measure the topography and reflection from calibration spheres and from stress fibers and adhesions in both fixed and motile cells. Unlike the data acquired with reflection interference contrast microscopy, where the reflection from adhesions can appear dark, our approach demonstrates that these regions have high reflectivity. The data acquired from fixed and live cells show the presence of a dense actin layer located ≈ 100 nm above the coverslip interface. Finally, the measured dynamics of filopodia and the lamella in a live cell supports retrograde flow as the dominate mechanism responsible for filopodia retraction.
User Participation in Contemporary IS Development: an IS management perspective

User participation in IS development has become an established practice perceived to improve both the development process and its outcomes. Recently, however, Markus and Mao (2004) have highlighted the need to revisit user participation in light of the changing IS development environment. A survey of New Zealand organisations with 200 or more full-time employees was undertaken in order to obtain an updated assessment of the actual practice of user participation in IS development projects. The results suggest that user participation continues to be a dominant aspect of IS development. The paper provides empirical data on the common reasons for having users participate and the form and types of user activities in development. The responding organisations perceived user participation to be beneficial to IS development in their recent IS projects, and many intended continuing or increasing their current levels of user participation in the future.
Automatic tagging method of verb-verb collocation based on model library

The paper proposes a tagging method based on verb-verb collocation examples, and sets up an example-database on selected 100 000 word corpus, it develops a tagging system of verb-verb collocation on the basis of examples and does tagging experiments on x <1 verb-verb collocation and x>l verb-verb collocation from 50 000 word corpus. Its precision rate arrives at 93.17%.
Zinc supplementation during in vitro maturation increases the production efficiency of cloned pigs

Zinc supplementation (0.8 µg/ml) in in vitro maturation (IVM) medium significantly enhances oocyte quality. In this study, we compared the development of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) embryos produced from conventional IVM (control) and zinc-supplemented IVM oocytes. A total of 1206 and 890 SCNT embryos were produced using control and zinc-supplemented oocytes, respectively, and then were transferred to 11 and 8 recipients, respectively. Five control recipients and three zinc-supplemented recipients became pregnant. Two live piglets and eight mummies were born from two control recipients, and ten live piglets and six stillborn piglets were born from three zinc-supplemented recipients. The production efficiency significantly increased in the zinc-supplemented group (0.33% vs. 3.02%). This report suggests that zinc supplementation in IVM medium improved the production efficiency of cloned pigs.
Detecting Tree Distributed Predicates

In a large-scale locality-driven network, knowing the state of a local area is sometimes necessary due to either interactions being local and driven by neighborhood proximity or the users being interested in the state of a certain region. We propose locality-aware predicates that aim at detecting a predicate within a specified area. We model the area of interest as the set of processes that are within distance k from the initiator process. By associating the predicate with a tree topology, we force the set of processes satisfying the predicate to form a tree with height no more than k. This enables the detection of the predicate within the area of interest. We also formalize several classes of locality-aware predicates, which deal with strong stable and stable predicates for both conjunctive and relational types. The algorithms to detect each class are also proposed. These algorithms associate a tree topology constraint with the predicate to be detected. Since a locality-aware predicate detects predicates only within the specified area, the complexities of the corresponding algorithms are thus scale-free. These properties make locality-aware predicate a natural fit for detecting distributed properties in systems such as modular robotics and wireless sensor networks.
The role of money in Pacific Island countries

There has been a general consensus among economists that while the long-run effects of money are felt only on prices with no impact on real variables, monetary policy changes do have important short-run effects on real variables. The objective of the paper is to investigate whether money has played any significant part in output growth as well as determination of prices in five Pacific island countries (PICs) under fixed exchange rate regimes, namely Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. After applying bound test, Granger causality test, variance decomposition and impulse response function analyses, we find that broad money (M2) has a short-run as well as long-run causal relationship with both output and prices in all PICs.
(Non)Persistent Effects of Fertility on Female Labour Supply

The negative association between fertility and female labour market participation is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. We address this problem by using an exogenous variation in family size caused by infertility shocks, mainly related to the fact that nature prevents some women from achieving their desired fertility levels. Despite a widely documented reduction of female labour supply around childbirth, using the Bank of Italy's SHIW we find that this effect dissipates over time, with some clues of penalties related to job quality. Results are confirmed exploiting the Istat Birth Survey, with insights of a different impact according to the age of the child.
Space-Time Block Codes from Cyclic Division Algebras : An Introduction

Coding theory addresses the problem of transmitting information accurately across noisy channels. When a sender transmits a signal s, it will suffer some changes before it reaches the receiver. The receiver then faces the problem of recovering the intended signal, given that he actually received some altered signal r. The challenge of coding theory, then, is to design a system which not only gives the receiver a high probability of determining s given r, but is also fast and inexpensive. Most solutions to this problem involve choosing, among all the signals that could be transmitted, some subset of “legal” codewords which are not too similar to one another. Then if r is in fact a codeword, the receiver may assume that r = s; otherwise, presumably s was a codeword similar to r. Natural languages incorporate such “redundancy” already; if written words are misspelled, the reader can very often reconstruct the original text of the author verbatim. Devising some analogue of this natural process for arbitrary data is the task of coding theory. Historically, the codewords used were vectors, but in recent years codes using matrices have been developed. In early 1998 Tarokh, Seshadri, and Calderbank proposed a system called “space-time coding” [7], and later that year the classical example, the Alamouti scheme, was published [1]. Efforts to generalize Alamouti have recently turned to division algebras to obtain good collections of matrices for codebooks. This paper will first briefly introduce the basic concepts needed to understand spacetime block codes, outlining the criteria a good code must satisfy; it then will summarize the constructions used in two recent papers to produce workable space-time block codes from cyclic division algebras.
Risk of thyroid cancer after exposure to 131I in childhood.

BACKGROUND After the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in April 1986, a large increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid cancer was reported in contaminated areas. Most of the radiation exposure to the thyroid was from iodine isotopes, especially 131I. We carried out a population-based case-control study of thyroid cancer in Belarus and the Russian Federation to evaluate the risk of thyroid cancer after exposure to radioactive iodine in childhood and to investigate environmental and host factors that may modify this risk. METHODS We studied 276 case patients with thyroid cancer through 1998 and 1300 matched control subjects, all aged younger than 15 years at the time of the accident. Individual doses were estimated for each subject based on their whereabouts and dietary habits at the time of the accident and in following days, weeks, and years; their likely stable iodine status at the time of the accident was also evaluated. Data were analyzed by conditional logistic regression using several different models. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS A strong dose-response relationship was observed between radiation dose to the thyroid received in childhood and thyroid cancer risk (P<.001). For a dose of 1 Gy, the estimated odds ratio of thyroid cancer varied from 5.5 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 3.1 to 9.5) to 8.4 (95% CI = 4.1 to 17.3), depending on the risk model. A linear dose-response relationship was observed up to 1.5-2 Gy. The risk of radiation-related thyroid cancer was three times higher in iodine-deficient areas (relative risk [RR]= 3.2, 95% CI = 1.9 to 5.5) than elsewhere. Administration of potassium iodide as a dietary supplement reduced this risk of radiation-related thyroid cancer by a factor of 3 (RR = 0.34, 95% CI = 0.1 to 0.9, for consumption of potassium iodide versus no consumption). CONCLUSION Exposure to (131)I in childhood is associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer. Both iodine deficiency and iodine supplementation appear to modify this risk. These results have important public health implications: stable iodine supplementation in iodine-deficient populations may substantially reduce the risk of thyroid cancer related to radioactive iodines in case of exposure to radioactive iodines in childhood that may occur after radiation accidents or during medical diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.
A theoretical probabilistic simulation framework for dynamic power estimation

As fast non-simulation-based power estimation techniques, probabilistic simulation techniques were widely researched in the 1990s. Spatial and temporal correlations are commonly known as two fundamental challenges of these kinds of techniques. Previous work showed that spatial correlation could be coped with by means of bit-parallel simulation. For temporal correlation that has great impact on estimating glitches, previous work only showed that it could be considered by means of a glitch-filtering scheme which is an approximation algorithm, but did not answer the question whether temporal correlation could be overcome without any approximation. Our work extends conventional probabilistic simulation techniques and puts the essentials and extensions of probabilistic simulation into a theoretical framework. Based on the framework, this paper shows that modeling temporal correlation in probabilistic simulation without any approximation is only possible in theory. Therefore, an improved approximation of the exact method is proposed. Compared to the conventional probabilistic simulation, our prominently improved results prove the effectiveness of our approximation algorithm. At the end of this paper, the advantages and the bottlenecks of probabilistic simulation are concluded in general.
Toric ideals for high Veronese subrings of toric algebras

We prove that the defining ideal of a sufficiently high Veronese subring of a toric algebra admits a quadratic Gr\"obner basis consisting of binomials. More generally, we prove that the defining ideal of a sufficiently high Veronese subring of a standard graded ring admits a quadratic Gr\"obner basis. We give a lower bound on $d$ such that the defining ideal of $d$-th Veronese subring admits a quadratic Gr\"obner basis. Eisenbud--Reeves--Totaro stated the same theorem without a proof with some lower bound on $d$. In many cases, our lower bound is less than Eisenbud--Reeves--Totaro's lower bound.
A Nanostructured Matrices Assessment to Study Drug Distribution in Solid Tumor Tissues by Mass Spectrometry Imaging

The imaging of drugs inside tissues is pivotal in oncology to assess whether a drug reaches all cells in an adequate enough concentration to eradicate the tumor. Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MALDI-MSI) is one of the most promising imaging techniques that enables the simultaneous visualization of multiple compounds inside tissues. The choice of a suitable matrix constitutes a critical aspect during the development of a MALDI-MSI protocol since the matrix ionization efficiency changes depending on the analyte structure and its physico-chemical properties. The objective of this study is the improvement of the MALDI-MSI technique in the field of pharmacology; developing specifically designed nanostructured surfaces that allow the imaging of different drugs with high sensitivity and reproducibility. Among several nanomaterials, we tested the behavior of gold and titanium nanoparticles, and halloysites and carbon nanotubes as possible matrices. All nanomaterials were firstly screened by co-spotting them with drugs on a MALDI plate, evaluating the drug signal intensity and the signal-to-noise ratio. The best performing matrices were tested on control tumor slices, and were spotted with drugs to check the ion suppression effect of the biological matrix. Finally; the best nanomaterials were employed in a preliminary drug distribution study inside tumors from treated mice.
Relating the provable collapse of P to NC1 and the power of logical theories

We show that the following three statements are equivalent: QPV is conservative over QALV, QALV proves its open induction formulas, and QALV proves P = NC 1. Here QPV and QALV are rst order theories whose function symbols range over polynomial-time and NC 1 functions, respectively.
Nested data-parallelism on the gpu

Graphics processing units (GPUs) provide both memory bandwidth and arithmetic performance far greater than that available on CPUs but, because of their Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) architecture, they are hard to program. Most of the programs ported to GPUs thus far use traditional data-level parallelism, performing only operations that operate uniformly over vectors. NESL is a first-order functional language that was designed to allow programmers to write irregular-parallel programs - such as parallel divide-and-conquer algorithms - for wide-vector parallel computers. This paper presents our port of the NESL implementation to work on GPUs and provides empirical evidence that nested data-parallelism (NDP) on GPUs significantly outperforms CPU-based implementations and matches or beats newer GPU languages that support only flat parallelism. While our performance does not match that of hand-tuned CUDA programs, we argue that the notational conciseness of NESL is worth the loss in performance. This work provides the first language implementation that directly supports NDP on a GPU.
A Study of VBR Traffic Treatment in a Diffserv Domain

Abstract The unreliable network layer in the Internet has been a cause of concern for network managers and users. The unreliability manifests itself in terms of lost or delayed packets due to congestion or failure in the network. One of the causes of congestion is the inherent burstiness of network traffic. Traffic includes unpredictable large file or web page transfers as well as variable-rate media streams. “Traffic shaping” means smoothing the traffic as a function of time. Many different schemes to perform shaping have been proposed. The target of such schemes is to increase the amount of traffic that can be supported while maintaining the required quality of service and reducing the amount of congestion in the network. This article presents the results of an investigation into the effects of using various shapers and markers on VBR streams in a Diffserv domain. Simulations are conducted using NS–2 simulation platform applying VBR streams that are shaped using TB and dual-TB shapers followed by srTCM, trTcm, and tswTCM markers. The shaped traffic is applied across a Diffserv domain under unloaded and loaded traffic conditions to determine the effect on the level of congestion due to a particular scheme. Generally, in TB shapers, changing the bucket size affects the burstiness of the traffic and changing the queue length affects the delay of the traffic. Applying different traffic parameters (w.r.t. applications) and connecting them to various shapers provides a suitable burst size and delay for each application and allows different colouring of packets. The most suitable shapers generate a maximum number of green packets, thus reducing the potential for congestion in the network.
Application of SAR Data to the Mapping of Paleodrainages underneath Sand Sheets in the United Arab Emirates

The data from PALASAR L band and Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) and the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission sensors successfully reveals new paleodrainage system, which flows northwest and southwest through sand dune corridors of the United Arab Emirates and end up in the Arabian Gulf. The flow directions simulated automatically from the topographic data of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission sensor using D8 algorithm confirms the presence of the discovered paleodrainage system that could have formed during flood seasons on the Oman Mountain during the late Quaternary. During late Quaternary the United Arab Emirates was dominated by two shallow paleodrainage systems that flowed into the Arabian Gulf, the NW-SE trending draining northern Emirates and the SW-NE trending draining Abu Dhabi and Dubai Emirates. The sand dune corridors along the linear sand dune aquifer are considered of good potential as it was received a considerable amount of rainwater during the late Quaternary. Detailed geophysical survey to sand dune corridors should beconducted for further estimation of the groundwater quality.
A Cloud Access Security Broker based approach for encrypted data search and sharing

Encryption will play a more important role as more computation and storage are outsourced. Achieving good balance between strong security and application functionality preservation becomes a cutting-edge research problem. SE algorithms are well studied, which delegate search capabilities to the cloud provider without decrypting the documents. But this approach imposes extra constraints on cloud API and loses search query expressiveness. This paper proposes a CASB based framework for encrypted search and data sharing, which builds the search index locally and only points the identifiers of ciphertext into cloud, promisingly expresses full set search functionalities while using keys that the user can control. Experimental results are taken to quantitatively analyze the performance overhead and throughput of the broker.
Regulation of AMPA Receptor GluR1 Subunit Surface Expression by a 4.1N-Linked Actin Cytoskeletal Association

The synaptic localization, clustering, and immobilization of neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels play important roles in synapse formation and synaptic transmission. Although several proteins have been identified that interact with AMPA receptors and that may regulate their synaptic targeting, little is known about the interaction of AMPA receptors with the cytoskeleton. In studies examining the interaction of the AMPA receptor GluR1 subunit with neuronal proteins, we determined that GluR1 interacts with the 4.1G and 4.1N proteins, homologs of the erythrocyte membrane cytoskeletal protein 4.1. Using the yeast two-hybrid system and a heterologous cell system, we demonstrated that both 4.1G and 4.1N bind to a membrane proximal region of the GluR1 C terminus, and that a region within the C-terminal domain of 4.1G or 4.1N is sufficient to mediate the interaction. We also found that 4.1N can associate with GluR1 in vivo and colocalizes with AMPA receptors at excitatory synapses. Disruption of the interaction of GluR1 with 4.1N or disruption of actin filaments decreased the surface expression of GluR1 in heterologous cells. Moreover, disruption of actin filaments in cultured cortical neurons dramatically reduced the level of surface AMPA receptors. These results suggest that protein 4.1N may link AMPA receptors to the actin cytoskeleton.
Functional Interactions between Estrogen and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I in the Regulation of α1B-Adrenoceptors and Female Reproductive Function

The ovarian hormone estradiol (E2) and insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) interact in the CNS to regulate neuroendocrine function and synaptic remodeling. Previously, our laboratory showed that 2 d E2 treatment induces α1B-adrenoceptor expression and promotes IGF-I enhancement of α1-adrenoceptor potentiation of cAMP accumulation in the preoptic area (POA) and hypothalamus (HYP). This study examined the hypothesis that E2-dependent aspects of female reproductive function, including α1B-adrenoceptor expression and function in the POA and HYP, are mediated by brain IGF-I receptors (IGF-IRs) in female rats. Ovariohysterectomized rats were implanted with a guide cannula aimed at the third ventricle and treatedin vivo with vehicle or E2 daily for 2 d before experimentation. Intracerebroventricular infusions of JB-1, a selective IGF-IR antagonist, were administered every 12 hr beginning 1 hr before the first E2 injection. Administration of JB-1 during E2 priming completely blocks hormone-induced luteinizing hormone release and partially inhibits hormone-dependent reproductive behavior. Reproductive behavior is restored by intracerebroventricular infusion of 8-bromo-cGMP, the second messenger implicated in α1-adrenergic facilitation of lordosis. In addition, blockade of IGF-IRs during E2priming prevents E2-induced increases in α1B-adenoceptor binding density and abolishes acute IGF-I enhancement of NE-stimulated cAMP accumulation in HYP and POA slices. These data document the existence of a novel mechanism by which IGF-I participates in the remodeling of noradrenergic receptor signaling in the HYP and POA after E2 treatment. These events may help coordinate the timing of ovulation with the expression of sexual receptivity.