Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coupling Spatiotemporal Community Assembly Processes to Changes in Microbial Metabolism

Community assembly processes generate shifts in species abundances that influence ecosystem cycling of carbon and nutrients, yet our understanding of assembly remains largely separate from ecosystem-level functioning. Here, we investigate relationships between assembly and changes in microbial metabolism across space and time in hyporheic microbial communities. We pair sampling of two habitat types (i.e., attached and planktonic) through seasonal and sub-hourly hydrologic fluctuation with null modeling and temporally explicit multivariate statistics. We demonstrate that multiple selective pressures—imposed by sediment and porewater physicochemistry—integrate to generate changes in microbial community composition at distinct timescales among habitat types. These changes in composition are reflective of contrasting associations of Betaproteobacteria and Thaumarchaeota with ecological selection and with seasonal changes in microbial metabolism. We present a conceptual model based on our results in which metabolism increases when oscillating selective pressures oppose temporally stable selective pressures. Our conceptual model is pertinent to both macrobial and microbial systems experiencing multiple selective pressures and presents an avenue for assimilating community assembly processes into predictions of ecosystem-level functioning.
Active Site Residues and Amino Acid Specificity of the Ubiquitin Carrier Protein-binding RING-H2 Finger Domain*

EL5 is a rice ubiquitin-protein isopeptide ligase (E3) containing a RING-H2 finger domain that interacts with Oryza sativa (Os) UBC5b, a rice ubiquitin carrier protein. We introduced point mutations into the EL5 RING-H2 finger so that residues that functionally interact with OsUBC5b could be identified when assayed for ubiquitination activity in vitro. The residue positions were selected based on the results of an EL5 RING-H2 finger/OsUBC5b NMR titration experiment. These RING-H2 finger residues form or are adjacent to a shallow groove that is recognized by OsUBC5b. The E3 activity of EL5 is shown to be dependent on a Trp located at the center of the groove. We classified rice RING fingers according to the type of metal-chelating motif, i.e. RING-H2 or RING-HC, and according to the presence or absence of a conserved EL5-like Trp. We discuss the probable relationship between E3 activity and the conserved Trp.
Trees of the Brain, Roots of the Mind

The human brain is often described as the most complex object in the universe. Tens of billions of nerve cells-tiny tree-like structures -- make up a massive network with enormous computational power. In this book, Giorgio Ascoli reveals another aspect of the human brain: the stunning beauty of its cellular form. Doing so, he makes a provocative claim about the mind-brain relationship. If each nerve cell enlarged a thousandfold looks like a tree, then a small region of the nervous system at the same magnified scale resembles a gigantic, fantastic forest. This structural majesty -- illustrated throughout the book with extraordinary color images -- hides the secrets behind the genesis of our mental states. Ascoli proposes that some of the most intriguing mysteries of the mind can be solved using the basic architectural principles of the brain. After an overview of the scientific and philosophical foundations of his argument, Ascoli links mental states with patterns of electrical activity in nerve cells, presents an emerging minority opinion of how the brain learns from experience, and unveils a radically new hypothesis of the mechanism determining what is learned, what isn't, and why. Finally, considering these notions in the context of the cosmic diversity within and among brains, Ascoli offers a new perspective on the roots of individuality and humanity.
Generalized First Order Decision Diagrams for First Order Markov Decision Processes

First order decision diagrams (FODD) were recently introduced as a compact knowledge representation expressing functions over relational structures. FODDs represent numerical functions that, when constrained to the Boolean range, use only existential quantification. Previous work developed a set of operations over FODDs, showed how they can be used to solve relational Markov decision processes (RMDP) using dynamic programming algorithms, and demonstrated their success in solving stochastic planning problems from the International Planning Competition in the system FODD-Planner. A crucial ingredient of this scheme is a set of operations to remove redundancy in decision diagrams, thus keeping them compact. This paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce Generalized FODDs (GFODD) and combination algorithms for them, generalizing FODDs to arbitrary quantification. Second, we show how GFODDs can be used in principle to solve RMDPs with arbitrary quantification, and develop a particularly promising case where an arbitrary number of existential quantifiers is followed by an arbitrary number of universal quantifiers. Third, we develop a new approach to reduce FODDs and GFODDs using model checking. This yields a reduction that is complete for FODDs and provides a sound reduction procedure for GFODDs.
Every Flower in the Garden: Collaboration Between School Librarians and Science Teachers

Both the teaching profession and the school library profession emphasize collaboration as a way to improve teaching and learning. However, K-12 school librarians rarely collaborate with science teachers. This article reviews publications related to collaboration between science teachers and school librarians. Themes that emerged from the literature included barriers to collaboration as well as opportunities to collaborate in four areas: traditional literacy instruction, information literacy instruction, classroom technology integration, and connecting science to students' daily lives. Gaps in the research and suggestions for future study are also included.
Teaching Speech Communication with a Foreign Accent: A Pilot Study.

A pilot study examined problems encountered by foreign instructors teaching in American colleges. Fourteen Chinese-born instructors teaching in Speech Communication answered a questionnaire containing 12 open-ended questions. Recurring themes were coded from the answers, and then organized into three categories: cultural differences; linguistic level of understanding; and relationship development. Results indicated that: (1) cultural differences was the major difficulty the subjects encountered; (2) deeper meanings of their students' language (including slang, idioms, and jokes) were the linguistic barriers the subjects were trying to overcome; (3) American students tended to use formal language to interact with foreign instructors, limiting establishment of personal relationships; and (4) subjects reported a high degree of satisfaction with teaching. Future studies shouid examine other ethnic groups besides the Chinese, other fields besides speech communication, and increase the number of participants for more reliable results. (A figure modeling the problems foreign instructors encountered in American colleges is included; 21 references and the questionnaire are attached.) (Author/RS) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** Teaching Speech Communication with a Foreign Accent: A Pilot Study Guo-Ming Chen Department of Communication Studies University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI 02881 Tel: (401) 792-2552 E-mail: cqm101 at uriacc.uri. edu Jensen Chung Department of Speech Communication San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA 94132 Tel: (415) 338-7794 E-mail: jchung at sfsuvaxl.sfsu. edu U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Offce of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as 'received from tivt person or organization originating It 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction Quality Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or pokcy "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERICI. " Paper presented at the 1993 annual meeting of Speech Communication Association, November, Miami Beach, Florida.
A new model for prediction of the age of onset and penetrance for Huntington's disease based on CAG length

Huntington's disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by an unstable CAG repeat. For patients at risk, participating in predictive testing and learning of having CAG expansion, a major unanswered question shifts from “Will I get HD? ” to “When will it manifest? ” Using the largest cohort of HD patients analyzed to date (2913 individuals from 40 centers worldwide), we developed a parametric survival model based on CAG repeat length to predict the probability of neurological disease onset (based on motor neurological symptoms rather than psychiatric onset) at different ages for individual patients. We provide estimated probabilities of onset associated with CAG repeats between 36 and 56 for individuals of any age with narrow confidence intervals. For example, our model predicts a 91% chance that a 40‐year‐old individual with 42 repeats will have onset by the age of 65, with a 95% confidence interval from 90 to 93%. This model also defines the variability in HD onset that is not attributable to CAG length and provides information concerning CAG‐related penetrance rates.
GISSD: Group I Intron Sequence and Structure Database

Group I Intron Sequence and Structure Database (GISSD) is a specialized and comprehensive database for group I introns, focusing on the integration of useful group I intron information from available databases and providing de novo data that is essential for understanding these introns at a systematic level. This database presents 1789 complete intron records, including the nucleotide sequence of each annotated intron plus 15 nt of the upstream and downstream exons, and the pseudoknots-containing secondary structures predicted by integrating comparative sequence analyses and minimal free energy algorithms. These introns represent all 14 subgroups, with their structure-based alignments being separately provided. Both structure predictions and alignments were done manually and iteratively adjusted, which yielded a reliable consensus structure for each subgroup. These consensus structures allowed us to judge the confidence of 20 085 group I introns previously found by the INFERNAL program and to classify them into subgroups automatically. The database provides intron-associated taxonomy information from GenBank, allowing one to view the detailed distribution of all group I introns. CDSs residing in introns and 3D structure information are also integrated if available. About 17 000 group I introns have been validated in this database; ∼95% of them belong to the IC3 subgroup and reside in the chloroplast tRNALeu gene. The GISSD database can be accessed at http://www.rna. whu.edu. cn/gissd/
Calcium-independent and cAMP-dependent Modulation of Soluble Guanylyl Cyclase Activity by G Protein-coupled Receptors in Pituitary Cells*

It is well established that G protein-coupled receptors stimulate nitric oxide-sensitive soluble guanylyl cyclase by increasing intracellular Ca2+ and activating Ca2+-dependent nitric-oxide synthases. In pituitary cells receptors that stimulated adenylyl cyclase, growth hormone-releasing hormone, corticotropin-releasing factor, and thyrotropin-releasing hormone also stimulated calcium signaling and increased cGMP levels, whereas receptors that inhibited adenylyl cyclase, endothelin-A, and dopamine-2 also inhibited spontaneous calcium transients and decreased cGMP levels. However, receptor-controlled up- and down-regulation of cyclic nucleotide accumulation was not blocked by abolition of Ca2+signaling, suggesting that cAMP production affects cGMP accumulation. Agonist-induced cGMP accumulation was observed in cells incubated in the presence of various phosphodiesterase and soluble guanylyl cyclase inhibitors, confirming that Gs-coupled receptors stimulatedde novo cGMP production. Furthermore, cholera toxin (an activator of Gs), forskolin (an activator of adenylyl cyclase), and 8-Br-cAMP (a permeable cAMP analog) mimicked the stimulatory action of Gs-coupled receptors on cGMP production. Basal, agonist-, cholera toxin-, and forskolin-stimulated cGMP production, but not cAMP production, was significantly reduced in cells treated with H89, a protein kinase A inhibitor. These results indicate that coupling seven plasma membrane-domain receptors to an adenylyl cyclase signaling pathway provides an additional calcium-independent and cAMP-dependent mechanism for modulating soluble guanylyl cyclase activity in pituitary cells.
A device for the detection of cognitive brain functions in completely paralyzed or unresponsive patients

Unresponsive patients with remaining cognitive abilities may be able to communicate with a brain-computer interface (BCI) such as the Thought Translation Device (TTD). Before initiating TTD learning, which may imply considerable effort, it is important to classify the patients' state of awareness and their remaining cognitive abilities. A tool for detection of cognitive activity (DCA) in the completely paralyzed was developed and integrated into the TTD which is a psychophysiological system for direct brain communication. In the present version, DCA entails five event-related brain-potential (ERP) experiments and investigates the capability of a patient to discriminate, e.g., between semantically related and unrelated concepts and categories. ERPs serve as an indicator of the patients' cortical information processing. Data from five severely brain-injured patients in persistent vegetative state diagnosed as unresponsive and five healthy controls are presented to illustrate the methodology. Two patients showing the highest responsiveness were selected for TTD training. The DCA integrated in the TTD allows screening of cognitive abilities and direct brain communication in the patients' home.
RESULTS ON SOME REAL STABILITY PRESERVERS

Real stable univariate polynomials are polynomials which have only real roots. They are the object of much investigation and their theory has had significant progress in recent years. A vast body of research (e.g., [Fis06],[BSS09],[BBb],[BBc]) deals with analyzing the linear transformations that map the set of real stable polynomials to itself. We say that a linear transformation T : R[x]→ R[x] preserves real stability if T (f) is real stable, whenever f is real stable. A seminal result by Borcea and Brändén is the complete characterization of all linear transformations that preserve stability of multivariate polynomials [BBb], which in the univariate case amounts precisely to characterization of all linear real stability preservers. The result by Borcea and Brändén asserts that a particular linear transformation T : R[x]→ R[x] preserves real stability but does not shed light on where on the real line do the roots of T (f) lie as a function of the roots of f . In this paper we try to answer this question for particular real stability preservers. First, we examine the movements of the largest and the smallest root after applying linear transformations associated to a multiplier sequence. Then,
Geo-Localization Based Scene Recognition

GPS information has been applied to many fields, especially the navigation systems. With the popularity of smart mobiles, we proposed a novel method for navigation which combines mobile GPS location information with scene recognition. In our approach, three steps of filters are used. Firstly, we utilize GPS information to discard a large number of images that are not nearby the query image. Secondly, local sensitive hash (LSH) is employed to achieve dimension reduction and hamming distance is adopted to filter images by the threshold value. For the drawback of BOW discarding spatial information, we adopt RANSAC algorithm to do the spatial verification and finish the third filter. Finally, voting-based method is employed to calculate the similarity of images. Our system returns the corresponding information of the query image. The experiment results demonstrate substantial improvements in query efficiency and precision.
Mirror Neurons, Embodied Simulation, and the Neural Basis of Social Identification

The shared intersubjective space in which we live since birth enables and bootstraps the constitution of the sense of identity we normally entertain with others. Social identification incorporates the domains of action, sensations, affect, and emotions and is underpinned by the activation of shared neural circuits. A common underlying functional mechanism—embodied simulation—mediates our capacity to share the meaning of actions, intentions, feelings, and emotions with others, thus grounding our identification with and connectedness to others. Social identification, empathy, and “we-ness” are the basic ground of our development and being. Embodied simulation provides a model of potential interest not only for our understanding of how interpersonal relations work or might be pathologically disturbed but also for psychoanalysis. The hypothesis is that embodied simulation is at work within the psychoanalytic setting between patient and analyst. The notions of projective identification and the interpersonal dynamic related to transference and countertransference can be viewed as instantiations of the implicit and prelinguistic mechanisms of the embodied simulation-driven mirroring mechanisms here reviewed.
TREINAMENTO FÍSICO AERÓBIO E O EIXO DE CRESCIMENTO GH/IGF-1 EM RATOS DIABÉTICOS EXPERIMENTAIS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of aerobic physical training on the GH/IGF-1 growth axis in experimental diabetic rats. For the study, male Wistar rats were distributed into 4 groups, sedentary control (SC), trained control (TC), sedentary diabetic (SD) and trained diabetic (TD). Experimental diabetes was induced by Aloxan (35mg/b.w.) The training program consisted in swimming 5 days/week, 1 h/day, supporting a load of 5% b.w. , during 6 weeks. At the 5 week the rats were submitted to glucose (GTT) and insulin (ITT) tolerance tests, and to an acute exercise test. At the end of the experimental period, the rats were sacrificed and the blood was collected for determinations of serum glucose, insulin, proteins, albumin, alkaline phosphatase, growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) and insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3). Samples of liver tissue were used to evaluate glycogen, protein and DNA contents and samples of muscle (gastrocnemius) were used to evaluate glycogen, protein, DNA and IGF-1 contents. The tibias were collected for weight length, mineral density and total area determination. The results were analyzed by ANOVA, and Bonferroni test and the significance level was set at 5%. To evaluate the relationship between variables, Spearman’s rank order analysis was performed. Diabetes decreased serum GH, IGF-1, IGFBP-3 and total tibia area in SD group (P<0.05). Diabetes also resulted in increase in glycaemia and serum alkaline phosphatase. Moreover, there was significant reduction in serum glucose in TD group when compared to SD. Aerobic training promoted increase in serum IGF-1 in both TC and TD groups and increased liver glycogen store, muscle IGF-1 content and tibia area in TD group when compared to sedentary SD (P<0.05). Besides, serum IGF-1 was positively correlated with tibia area and with growth rate. Therefore, it was concluded that aerobic physical training induces important metabolic and
How the crowd impacts commercial applications: a user-oriented approach

As crowdsourcing has been applied to a variety of disciplines, e.g. marketing and operationalization, more and more scientists turn their sights to how the crowd innovate software engineering to produce high quality software. However, they mainly focus on the impacts brought by domain experts or experienced developers on developing and managing open source softwares, whereas how softwares are influenced by the ordinary people e.g. end users is seldom discussed and easily omitted. To fill up the research gaps, we investigate into commercial application improvement paradigm with assistance of user crowd. The approach focuses on end users by proposing a workflow loop to form a healthy cycle between them and applications. Especially, the approach propose a suggestion model to encourage users to participate into application runtime adaptation. So far, a prototype is developed to enable the crowd to raise and modify their advices, and our prior work has proven the effectiveness in which applications consider the users’ advices to adapt themselves.
Biophysical properties of protein‐free, totally synthetic pulmonary surfactants, ALEC and Exosurf, in comparison with surfactant TA

An artificial pulmonary surfactant prepared from chloroform‐methanol extract of bovine pulmonary surfactant (surfactant TA) has been shown to be effective in both the prevention and the treatment of respiratory distress syndrome in premature babies. Recently, two types of protein‐free totally synthetic surfactants, artificial lung expanding compound (ALEC) and Exosurf, have been evaluated in clinical trials of surfactant therapy. Artificial lung expanding compound was used initially as a dry powder, but is now prepared as a crystalline suspension in saline at 4°C. In this study we compared the biophysical properties of three different forms of ALEC (dry powder, crystalline suspension at 4°C and 37°C), Exosurf and surfactant TA (Surfacten) using a modified Wilhelmy surface balance and a pulsating bubble surfactometer. Surface activity of a crystalline suspension of ALEC in cold saline was no better than the dry powder of ALEC. Surfactant activity of ALEC was improved by addition of hydrophobic surfactant protein B and C (SP‐B, SP‐C) which are important constituents of surfactant TA. Surface properties of ALEC in any form and Exosurf were not superior to those of surfactant TA. These results suggest that a surfactant which contains SP‐B and SP‐C does not necessarily have to be dry or crystalline for an effective exogenous surfactant.
H-Soz-u-Kult: Kommunikation und Fachinformation f?r die Geschichtswissenschaften

The beginnings of H-Soz-u-Kult go back to 1996 when a German-speaking Internet forum "Humanities. So cial and Cultural History" established itself at the HU Berlin as a part of the American H-Net. In essence H-Soz-u Kult is a moderated mailing list. However, editorial work is necessary in order to secure the scientific relevance of the submitted contributions. Since the foundation of H-Soz-u Kult, the contents and the technical processes unfolded suc cessively, and so a distributed editorial model with epochal, regional and scientific specializations was established. As a module for historical information and communication, H Soz-u-Kult was integrated into the project "Clio online" in the year 2002. Clio online is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). With the development of the portal system, an integration of special editor groups was feasible and additional possibilities for publication were created.