Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specialized gene expression in the epididymis.

The metamorphosis of an immature and nonfunctional sperm into a mature sperm capable of progressive motility and fertility is thought to be the result of a highly regulated and complex series of events in the epididymis. It is well established that sperm maturation is not intrinsic to sperm cells themselves but requires the interaction of spermatozoa with proteins that are synthesized and secreted by the epididymal epithelium in a highly regionalized manner. This regional expression of epididymal proteins results in the sperm encountering a unique and ever-changing luminal fluid environment as they progress through the epididymis, which ultimately results in sperm maturation. These maturational events also require the presence of androgens. Although epididymal secretory proteins have been studied for some time, the identity and function of these proteins in sperm maturation and the mechanisms by which their genes are controlled have not been elucidated. The identity and analysis of genes expressed only in discrete regions of the epididymis provide valuable information in the quest to determine the regional-specific functions necessary for sperm maturation. This review will examine several aspects of these epididymal genes including tissue and regional-specific expression, differential regulation by androgens and/or testicular factors, mechanisms by which these genes may be controlled, and the putative functional significance of these genes in the epididymis. Minireview
Which object is about to fall? Development of young children’s intuitive knowledge about physical support relations as assessed in an active search task

ABSTRACT Previous studies measuring looking-time suggested that already infants possess intuitive knowledge about physical support. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether children were able to apply this knowledge in an active search task. Two- to five-year-olds (N = 105) were presented with pairs of identical blocks positioned on the left- and right-hand side of an elevated platform with only one of the blocks sufficiently supported. At test, one of the blocks fell into one of two chutes adjacent to the platform out of children’s view. Children’s task was to retrieve the block they thought had fallen. Results revealed that while children aged 3 years or older searched reliably in the correct chute with symmetrically-shaped blocks, only 4- and 5-year-olds did so with asymmetrical blocks. Thus, intuitions about support do not appear to become accessible in action before children can use them to make verbal predictions.
Solar Cell Powering with Integrated Global Positioning System for mm3 Size Robots

A new concept of a solar cell powering with integrated Global Positioning System (GPS) for microrobots is proposed. The main idea is to use a projector to transfer energy and to provide global positioning information to the robots that are equipped with multi-segment solar cells on their top. First tests with a 3000 ANSI lumens beamer projecting a white image showed a scavenged power of 7.1 and 27.8 muW/mm2 for commercially available crystalline silicon solar cells and for thin film amorphous silicon solar cell respectively. Regarding the Global Positioning System, the projector sends regularly a sequence of 17 images and the robot decodes them using two independent solar cell segments acting as photodiodes in order to calculate its own position and orientation inside a defined arena. First experimental results on a large scale prototype are presented. For 2.65 times 2.65 mm2 photodiodes the x, y and angular resolution are 4 mm, 3 mm and 6 degrees respectively inside an arena of 512times384 mm2 and the duration of the sequence is 0.85 s
On Evaluation Contexts, Continuations, and the Rest of the Computation

Continuations are variously understood as representations of the current evaluation context and as representations of the rest of the computation, but these understandings contradict each other: plugging an expression in a context yields a new expression whereas sending an intermediate result to a continuation yields the final answer. We show that continuations-as-evaluation-contexts are the defunctionalized representation of the continuation of a singlestep reduction function and that continuations-as-the-rest-of-thecomputation are the continuation of an evaluation function. Furthermore, we show that defunctionalizing the continuation of an evaluator gives rise to the same evaluation contexts as in the singlestep reducer. The only difference is how these evaluation contexts are interpreted: a ‘plug’ interpretation yields one-step reduction, whereas a ‘refocus’ interpretation yields evaluation. We then present a constructive corollary of Reynolds’s historical warning about depending on the evaluation order of a metalanguage for an interpreter: The two best-known abstract machines for the λ-calculus, Krivine’s machine and Felleisen et al.’s CEK machine, are in fact the call-by-name and call-by-value counterparts of the same (evaluation-order dependent) interpreter for the λ-calculus.
Mobility robustness optimization based on UE mobility for LTE system

Self-organizing networks (SON) for cellular systems are emerging as an important technology to reduce the cost of network deployment and maintenances. Mobility robustness optimization (MRO) is one of the main use cases of SON and has been intensively studied in 3GPP working groups. In this paper, we take the user equipment (UE) speed into account to solve the MRO problem. We propose a US-MRO algorithm, which assigns different Hysteresis parameters to UEs with different speed. The simulation results show that the success rate of Handover (HO) is improved and user experience is enhanced by the US-MRO algorithm.
Rooting the tree of life: the phylogenetic jury is still out

This article aims to shed light on difficulties in rooting the tree of life (ToL) and to explore the (sociological) reasons underlying the limited interest in accurately addressing this fundamental issue. First, we briefly review the difficulties plaguing phylogenetic inference and the ways to improve the modelling of the substitution process, which is highly heterogeneous, both across sites and over time. We further observe that enriched taxon samplings, better gene samplings and clever data removal strategies have led to numerous revisions of the ToL, and that these improved shallow phylogenies nearly always relocate simple organisms higher in the ToL provided that long-branch attraction artefacts are kept at bay. Then, we note that, despite the flood of genomic data available since 2000, there has been a surprisingly low interest in inferring the root of the ToL. Furthermore, the rare studies dealing with this question were almost always based on methods dating from the 1990s that have been shown to be inaccurate for much more shallow issues! This leads us to argue that the current consensus about a bacterial root for the ToL can be traced back to the prejudice of Aristotle's Great Chain of Beings, in which simple organisms are ancestors of more complex life forms. Finally, we demonstrate that even the best models cannot yet handle the complexity of the evolutionary process encountered both at shallow depth, when the outgroup is too distant, and at the level of the inter-domain relationships. Altogether, we conclude that the commonly accepted bacterial root is still unproven and that the root of the ToL should be revisited using phylogenomic supermatrices to ensure that new evidence for eukaryogenesis, such as the recently described Lokiarcheota, is interpreted in a sound phylogenetic framework.
Recognition of (almost) spoken words: evidence from word play in Japanese

Current models of spoken-word recognition assume automatic activation of multiple candidate words fully or partially compatible with the speech input. We propose that listeners make use of this concurrent activation in word play such as punning. Distortion in punning should ideally involve no more than a minimal contrastive deviation between two words, namely a phoneme. Moreover, we propose that this metric of similarity does not presuppose phonemic awareness on the part of the punster. We support these claims with an analysis of modern and traditional puns in Japanese (in which phonemic awareness in language users is not encouraged by alphabetic orthography). For both data sets, the results support the predictions. Punning draws on basic processes of spokenword recognition, common across languages.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Biomechanical Analysis of Gait Adaptability in Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's Disease (PD) subjects are less able to adapt gait to fluctuating motor demands in daily life situations than the healthy elderly, e.g. in crowded places, crossing the road, and starting or stopping at traffic lights. Several studies proved gait abnormalities in PD. However, to our knowledge there is currently no biomechanical test that deals with the ability in gait adaptation. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a new biomechanical test which proves the adaptability of gait to fluctuating external conditions. In order to have a reproducible, quantitative gait-test, a treadmill was used, accessed by a special software. The so called adaptability-of-gait test (AOG) changed the treadmill's velocity ballistically and unpredictably for the test subjects. 49 PD-subjects and 10 age-matched controls (HC) participated in the study. In order to subdivide PD subjects in homogeneous groups, we used a cluster analysis. In a first-step of evaluation we focused on differences between PD with moderate (PDM) and severe disease stages (PDS) and HC and examined correlations according to existing, valid tests, e.g. Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) subscales, clinical and biomechanical gait-assessments. Results showed significant differences in gait-adaptation between the groups. Severe PD had a worse gait adaptation compared to PD moderate and HC. Correlation analysis of the PD sample showed significance differences between the AOG-test and bradykinesia and facial expression, but no significances differences according to conventional clinical gait assessments, e.g. Webster gait-test. We conclude that the AOG-test has potentials to identify a new gait performance: the adaptation of gait.
Numerous Old Starburst Galaxies in the Local Universe

Old starburst galaxies are deficient in O stars and hence do not exhibit strong line emission in the optical regime. However, there remain many B stars, which are expected to heat dust grains and generate strong continuum emission in the far-infrared. The IRAS data for a statistically complete sample of nearby galaxies reveal for the first time that such objects are as numerous as 30%-40% of the local galaxy population.
Non-Volatile Memory Based Cache Replacement Policy

Currently, most computer systems consist of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) as main memory and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) as storage devices. Due to DRAM’s volatile nature, it suffers from data loss in the event of power failure or system crash. With rapid development of new types of non-volatile memory, it becomes promising that one of these technologies will replace DRAM as main memory in the near future. Considering non-volatile memory as main memory in our future systems, some mechanisms designed for DRAM based system should be modified to fully explore the advantage of the non-volatile characteristic of main memory. In today’s DRAM based systems, newly updated pages will have to be flushed to HDD in every 30 seconds. In the future non-volatile memory based systems, any updated pages can be kept longer in main memory without the urgency to be flushed to HDD. Therefore, this opens opportunities to investigate new cache replacement policy. In this paper, we investigate and propose a new non-volatile memory based cache replacement policy that giving priority to re-group and synchronize long consecutive dirty pages to take advantage of HDD’s fast sequential access speed and nonvolatile property of main memory. Specifically, with the help of a fixed or dynamic Threshold, we synchronize and evict qualified consecutive dirty pages out of cache, instead of evicting singular page at the least recently used position. We evaluate our scheme with various I/O traces. The experimental results show that our proposed cache replacement policies shorten system I/O completion time more than 10x and improve cache hit ratio varied from 0.5% to 10% when compared with DRAM based LRU policy.
Operator content and modular property of Chern-Simons coupled to a massless scalar

The partition function of Abelian Chern-Simons coupled to massless charged scalar is evaluated in the inﬁnite k limit, on the geometry S 2 × S 1 . The expression is obtained by counting scaling operators and checked by calculating regularized determinant. It is shown that the partition function does not obey modular invariance in the form proposed by Cardy. A general form of modular invariance, if any, must be more involved.
EMFi material as wearable heart rate sensor for night time recordings

We propose a method for night time monitoring of heart rate. Our method uses one or more pressure sensitive elements integrated into a wristwatch. The sensing elements are made of film type electret material called EMFi (Electro Mechanical Film). We designed the signal processing algorithms keeping in mind on-line processing and later integration into a micro controller for wearable applications. We have evaluated our method by comparing beat-to-beat heart rate values obtained with EMFi sensors with accurate reference values calculated from reference ECG signal. We suggest based on the 209 s average continuous recognition time and 0.51 bpm mean error that our method provides adequate accuracy for night time heart rate and heart rate variability analysis, which enables the method to be used in various applications.
A Space Allocation Algorithm for Minimal Early and Tardy Costs in Space Scheduling

The factory space for assembly is one of critical resources for the machine assembly industry. In the past, many researches discussed job shop or single machine scheduling problems with time constraint. In machinery, factory space constrains scheduling. The most common way for scheduling jobs in machinery industry is to assign jobs based on experience. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to derive a method to schedule jobs for machinery industry and develop new dispatching rules. In this research, we develop an algorithm, Northwest corner searching algorithm to schedule jobs into the shop floor. In addition, two space dispatching rules, largest space requirement (LSR) and smallest space requirement (SSR), are also developed for sequencing jobs. We find that both the proposed algorithm and dispatching rule perform well in our experiments.
Characterization and Prevention of the Adsorption of Surfactant Protein D to Polypropylene

Surfactant Protein D (SP-D) is a multifunctional protein present in the lung and in respiratory secretions. In the process of developing new experimental approaches to examine SP-D function, we observed that SP-D adsorbs to polypropylene tubes to a great extent, thereby depleting SP-D from the solution. Although it is well known that proteins adsorb nonspecifically to plastic, this effect is usually diminished by treatments to make the plastic “low-retention” or “low-binding”. However, these treatments actually increased the binding of SP-D to the plastic. In addition, this adsorption affected the results of several assays, including proteolytic cleavage assays. In order to block SP-D from adsorbing to polypropylene and the effects caused by this adsorption, we coated the tubes with bovine serum albumin (BSA), as is commonly performed for ELISAs. This coating greatly diminished the amount of SP-D sticking to the plastic, providing an inexpensive and effective method for preventing adsorption and the artifacts resulting from this adsorption.
Practical Theology from the Perspective of Catholic Spirituality: A Hermeneutic of Discernment

Abstract This article examines practical theological hermeneutics through the lens of Catholic spirituality. Key to understanding the movement from description to analysis to revised praxis is the ways in which interpretive communities understand the connections between divine reality and human reality. In light of this, the article explores the relationship between epistemology and pneumatology found within Christian tradition by proposing an approach to practical theological hermeneutics rooted in the Ignatian practice of spiritual discernment. By doing so, this article seeks to contribute the potential contours of a distinctive Roman Catholic contribution to practical theology, and in a broader sense, show how the practice of discernment presents studies and methods in practical theology with a way of understanding connections among practical wisdom, habitus, research, and theological interpretation.
Audio content feature selection and classification a random forests and decision tree approach

Content information can be extracted from soundtracks of multimedia files. A good audio classifier as a pre-processor is crucial in such applications. Efforts have been made to develop effective and efficient audio content classifiers in which features were often selected in ad hoc or empirical ways. This paper proposes a set of systematic methods that use the random forests and decision trees to select features and support decisions. The proposed methods allow for heuristic formation of feature spaces, mitigating redundancy in datasets. The performance of the proposed methods has been compared with other common audio classifiers, and improvements in performance have been noted: feature spaces simplified, computational overhead reduced, and classification accuracy improved.
Maintaining evaluation designs in long term community based health promotion programmes: Heartbeat Wales case study.

STUDY OBJECTIVE--To examine the difficulties of developing and maintaining outcome evaluation designs in long term, community based health promotion programmes. DESIGN--Semistructured interviews of health promotion managers. SETTING--Wales and two reference health regions in England. PARTICIPANTS--Nine health promotion managers in Wales and 18 in England. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS--Information on selected heart health promotion activity undertaken or coordinated by health authorities from 1985-90 was collected. The Heartbeat Wales coronary heart disease prevention programme was set up in 1985, and a research and evaluation strategy was established to complement the intervention. A substantial increase in the budget occurred over the period. In the reference health regions in England this initiative was noted and rapidly taken up, thus compromising their use as control areas. CONCLUSION--Information on large scale, community based health promotion programmes can disseminate quickly and interfere with classic intervention/evaluation control designs through contamination. Alternative experimental designs for assessing the effectiveness of long term intervention programmes need to be considered. These should not rely solely on the use of reference populations, but should balance the measurement of outcome with an assessment of the process of change in communities. The development and use of intervention exposure measures together with well structured and comprehensive process evaluation in both the intervention and reference areas is recommended.
Emerging model systems in eco‐evo‐devo: the environmentally responsive spadefoot toad

SUMMARY Spadefoot toads have emerged as a model system for addressing fundamental questions in ecological and evolutionary developmental biology (eco‐evo‐devo). Their tadpoles produce a wide range of adaptive phenotypes in direct response to diverse environmental stimuli. Such phenotypic plasticity offers an excellent opportunity to examine how an organism's ecology affects its development as well as how an organism's development influences its ecology and evolution. By characterizing and understanding the interconnectedness between an organism's environment, its development responses, and its ecological interactions in natural populations, such research promises to clarify further the role of the environment in not only selecting among diverse phenotypes, but also creating such phenotypes in the first place.
Automatic Adaptation of the Time-Frequency Resolution for Sound Analysis and Re-Synthesis

We present an algorithm for sound analysis and re-synthesis with local automatic adaptation of time-frequency resolution. The reconstruction formula we propose is highly efficient, and gives a good approximation of the original signal from analyses with different time-varying resolutions within complementary frequency bands: this is a typical case where perfect reconstruction cannot in general be achieved with fast algorithms, which provides an error to be minimized. We provide a theoretical upper bound for the reconstruction error of our method, and an example of automatic adaptive analysis and re-synthesis of a music sound.
Restoring of single ion-channel current based on wavelet transform

Patch-clamp recordings or artificial planar bilayer recordings provide an effective mean for detailed kinetics studies at singular molecular level. The restoration or idealization into continuous dwell-time sequences of noisy single channel recordings is the essential fundamental of successive analysis. In term of the characteristics of step changes in data recording when switching between open and close states, we present a jump-edge detection method using specific wavelet based on its ability of singularity detection for determining the borders of open or closed events. Meanwhile, two important problems are in detail discussed including the threshold selection criterion and identification of min/max extreme point pairs. Applications to simulation and experiment data elucidate the performances and virtues of the proposed method.
NUMERICAL SOLUTION OF FREDHOLM INTEGRAL EQUATIONS OF THE SECOND KIND BY USING FUZZY TRANSFORMS

In this paper, we introduce an approach by using inverse fuzzy transforms based on the fuzzy partition with combination in collocation technique for the numerical solution of Fredholm integral equations of the second kind. The main advantage of this approach is to reduce the problem to the linear system of equations. We present the convergence theorem for this method. Finally, we give two examples to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
History of Development and Concept of Person-Centered Counseling in Cultural Diversity

This study aims to obtain knowledge about two things; (1) how the development history of person-centered counseling, and (2) how the concept of person-centered theory in cultural diversity. This article contains a theory review regarding the history of the development of the theory of counseling person-centered and the concept of the theory in the diversity of culture of counseling and cultural diversity in schools. Person-centered counseling is the third generation of counseling models developed by Rogers. This model is more person-centered, emphasizing the need for experts who provide counseling (counselors) to involve aspects of their own personality and personality aspects of the counseled party (counselee) in the counseling process. Person-centered counseling also emphasizes the affective aspects of the individual, has a positive outlook on human nature