Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
14q32 miRNA cluster takes center stage in neovascularization.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that post-transcriptionally control gene expression by binding to target mRNAs, thereby inducing degradation or translational inhibition. Various miRNAs regulate physiological and pathophysiological processes in the cardiovascular system and control angiogenesis and neovascularization as well as vessel remodeling and atherosclerosis.1,2 miRNAs are expressed as primary transcripts that are subsequently processed by endonucleases into the mature forms. Primary transcripts often encode several miRs, so-called clusters. The 14q32 miRNA cluster is among the largest polycistronic clusters and comprises 54 miRNAs in humans and 61 in mice.3 Article, see p 696 In this issue of Circulation Research , miRNAs of the 14q32 cluster were shown to regulate neovascularization after hindlimb ischemia.4 An interesting bioinformatics approach made the authors think that this miRNA cluster may be an important regulator of neovascularization. Authors selected genes that are known to control the complex process of neovascularization particularly angiogenesis and arteriogenesis and determined the enrichment of predicted miRNA target sites in these genes. Enrichment for target genes was observed for the previously described neovascularization-regulatory miRNAs, such as members of miR-17-92a and related clusters,5 and the miR-15a family.6 In addition, they identified putative target sites for 27 miRNAs from the 14q32 cluster. Silencing of 4 selected miRNAs, namely miR-329, miR-487b, miR-494, and miR-495, enhanced the recovery of blood flow after hindlimb ischemia, suggesting that at least these 14q32 cluster members impair neovascularization. Although the recovery of blood flow was similar after silencing of the different cluster members, targeting miR-329 and miR-487b showed a more profound effect on the remodeling of small to larger arteries and inhibition of miR-329, miR-487b, and miR-495 augmented capillary density. The effect of …
Efficient design of two-stage comb-based decimation filters using Chebyshev sharpening

A simple and efficient method to design multiplierless two-stage comb-based decimation filters is presented. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the Chebyshev sharpening, recently introduced in literature, to obtain higher selectivity in comparison to traditional comb filters. The resulting filter has better magnitude response characteristics and fewer Additions Per Output Sample (APOS) with respect to other two-stage comb-based filters available in literature.
The public opinion climate for gene technologies in Canada and the United States: competing voices, contrasting frames

This exploratory study of Canadian and US public opinion about gene technologies is based primarily on survey data collected by the Government of Canada, with media data from a widely available commercial database (LexisNexis) used in an illustrative case study of the apparent resonance between the climate of opinion and media frames in different regions of the two countries. The study uses regression modeling, factor analysis and cluster analysis to characterize the structure of the opinion data, concluding that observed opinion differences might be understood in terms of the greater number of individuals in the United States who belong to an identifiable opinion group that believes these technologies are benign and must be developed (termed, for convenience, “true believers”), as well as a somewhat greater number in Canada who belong to a group believing that ordinary people should be able to decide based on ethical considerations (“ethical populists”). However, the most common group in each country is made up of people who believe risks or costs and benefits should be weighed in developing policy, and that this should be done by experts (“utilitarians”). This group and two other cluster groups identified in the analysis (“moral authoritarians” and “democratic pragmatists”) exist in roughly equivalent proportions in both countries, with some regional variation evident within each. While these observations represent descriptive findings only, they nevertheless underscore the complexity of the opinion climate and problematize the development of consensus policy. Preliminary analysis of news coverage of selected gene technologies revealed both similarities and differences in patterns of news discourse between Canada and the US. A sample of stem cell coverage for February 2004, following the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle (during which the announcement of new Korean research on human cloning was made), was used as a case study for a pilot media analysis.
Query-adaptive late fusion with neural network for instance search

Bag-of-Word based model is one of the state-of-the-art approaches for object retrieval or also known as instance search problem. Although this model and its extensions are good for rich-textured objects, it is still unsolved for searching on textureless ones. In this paper, we propose to combine this model with Deformable Part Models object detector using late fusion technique to improve final result. To find the optimal weights for each type of query objects, we further propose to use a neural network to learn query features including object area, number of shared visual words to get optimal weights for each model. Experimental results on TRECVID Instance Search (INS) dataset with queries in INS2013 and INS2014 show that our proposed method significantly improves 18.48% and 14.63% in mAP respectively comparing to standard BOW model and outperform other state-of-the-art methods. This method opens a new way of adaptively combining DPM, an object detector, in a hybrid model for visual instance search.
Primary peritoneal serous papillary carcinoma presenting as a large mesenteric mass mistaken for ovarian cancer: a case of primary peritoneal carcinoma

Peritoneal origin serous papillary carcinoma is an uncommon primary malignancy occurring in the abdominal or pelvic peritoneum lining. It is characterized by peritoneal carcinomatosis with massive ascites, uninvolved or minimally involved ovary, and is histologically indistinguishable from ovarian serous tumors. Better recognition of this phenomenon in recent years has contributed to an increasing diagnostic frequency. We describe a rare case of peritoneal origin serous papillary carcinoma with unusual clinical presentations involving a solitary primary tumor originating from the peritoneal lining of the sigmoid colonal mesentery, without pelvic lymph node involvement or distant metastasis. Because of the location and morphological similarity, it was misdiagnosed as an ovarian malignancy. We aim to assist in the diagnosis of this disease with the following case report, thereby improving the management of patients with this condition.
The variable effects of high school tracking.

The effects of tracking in high schools depend in part on the way tracking is organized: To the extent that the structure of tracking varies across schools, tracking's impact on achievement also varies. I examine four structural characteristics of tracking systems: selectivity, electivity, inclusiveness, and scope. I predict that differences in these characteristics lead to variation in between-track inequality (the achievement gap between tracks) and school productivity (average achievement of students in the school), net of the composition of the student body. In addition, I hypothesize that Catholic schools have less inequality between tracks and higher productivity overall than public schools. I test the hypotheses using data from High School and Beyond, a national survey of high schools and their students. The results show that schools vary significantly in the magnitude of track effects on math achievement, and they differ in net average achievement on both math and verbal tests. Schools with more mobility in their tracking systems produce higher math achievement overall. They also have smaller gaps between tracks in both math and verbal achievement when compared to schools with more rigid tracking systems. Moderately inclusive systems also have less between-track inequality in math; and overall school achievement tends to rise in both subjects as inclusiveness increases. The hypotheses about Catholic schools are also supported, especially for math achievement. The way Catholic schools implement tracking partially accounts for their advantages.
The AKRON-Kalman filter for tracking time-varying networks

We propose the AKRON-Kalman filter for the problem of inferring sparse dynamic networks from a noisy undersampled set of measurements. Unlike the Lasso-Kalman filter, which uses regularization with the l1-norm to find an approximate sparse solution, the AKRON-Kalman tracker uses the l1 approximation to find the location of a “sufficient number” of zero entries that guarantees the existence of the optimal sparsest solution. This sufficient number of zeros can be shown to be exactly equal to the dimension of the kernel of an under-determined system. The AKRON-Kalman tracker then iteratively refines this solution of the l1 problem by ensuring that the observed reconstruction error does not exceed the measurement noise level. The AKRON solution is sparser, by construction, than the Lasso solution while the Kalman tracking ensures that all past observations are taken into account to estimate the network in any given stage. The AKRON-Kalman tracker is applied to the inference of the time-varying wing-muscle genetic regulatory network of the Drosophila Melanogaster (fruit fly) during the embryonic, larval, pupal and adulthood phases. Unlike all previous approaches, the proposed AKRON-Kalman was able to recover all reportedly known interactions in the Flybase dataset.
Human gait recognition based on compactness

Gait recognition is new biological identity technology and widely researched in recent years for its many advantages compared with other biological identity technology. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective feature-compactness for gait recognition. First an improved background subtraction algorithm is used to obtain the silhouettes. Then the compactness is extracted from the images in the gait sequence as the feature vector. In the step of classification, DTW algorithm is adopted to adjust the feature vectors before classifying and two classifiers (NN and ENN) are used as classifiers. Because of the simple features which we choose, it consumes little time for recognition and the results turn out to be encouraging.
Newt satellite 2 transcripts self-cleave by using an extended hammerhead structure

Synthetic transcripts of satellite 2 DNA from newts undergo self-catalyzed, site-specific cleavage in vitro. Cleavage occurs within a domain that is similar to the hammerhead domain used by a number of self-cleaving, infectious plant RNAs. The newt hammerhead has a potentially unstable structure due to a stem composed of two base pairs and a 2-nucleotide loop, and unlike other hammerheads that have been studied, it cannot cleave as an isolated unit. Here we show that cleavage by a single newt hammerhead requires additional satellite 2 sequences flanking both ends of the hammerhead domain. We also present a structural model of a truncated satellite 2 transcript which is capable of cleavage. The structure includes an internally looped extension to one of the conserved stems of the hammerhead. By in vitro mutagenesis, the identities of each of the five nucleotides composing one of the internal loops were shown to be critical for cleavage. Additional evidence that the extension stimulates self-cleavage in a manner other than by simply stabilizing the hammerhead is presented.
Impedance coupling in content-targeted advertising

The current boom of the Web is associated with the revenues originated from on-line advertising. While search-based advertising is dominant, the association of ads with a Web page (during user navigation) is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we study the problem of associating ads with a Web page, referred to as content-targeted advertising, from a computer science perspective. We assume that we have access to the text of the Web page, the keywords declared by an advertiser, and a text associated with the advertiser's business. Using no other information and operating in fully automatic fashion, we propose ten strategies for solving the problem and evaluate their effectiveness. Our methods indicate that a matching strategy that takes into account the semantics of the problem (referred to as AAK for "ads and keywords") can yield gains in average precision figures of 60% compared to a trivial vector-based strategy. Further, a more sophisticated impedance coupling strategy, which expands the text of the Web page to reduce vocabulary impedance with regard to an advertisement, can yield extra gains in average precision of 50%. These are first results. They suggest that great accuracy in content-targeted advertising can be attained with appropriate algorithms.
Evaluation of Two Library-Independent Microbial Source Tracking Methods To Identify Sources of Fecal Contamination in French Estuaries

ABSTRACT In order to identify the origin of the fecal contamination observed in French estuaries, two library-independent microbial source tracking (MST) methods were selected: (i) Bacteroidales host-specific 16S rRNA gene markers and (ii) F-specific RNA bacteriophage genotyping. The specificity of the Bacteroidales markers was evaluated on human and animal (bovine, pig, sheep, and bird) feces. Two human-specific markers (HF183 and HF134), one ruminant-specific marker (CF193′), and one pig-specific marker (PF163) showed a high level of specificity (>90%). However, the data suggest that the proposed ruminant-specific CF128 marker would be better described as an animal marker, as it was observed in all bovine and sheep feces and 96% of pig feces. F RNA bacteriophages were detected in only 21% of individual fecal samples tested, in 60% of pig slurries, but in all sewage samples. Most detected F RNA bacteriophages were from genotypes II and III in sewage samples and from genotypes I and IV in bovine, pig, and bird feces and from pig slurries. Both MST methods were applied to 28 water samples collected from three watersheds at different times. Classification of water samples as subject to human, animal, or mixed fecal contamination was more frequent when using Bacteroidales markers (82.1% of water samples) than by bacteriophage genotyping (50%). The ability to classify a water sample increased with increasing Escherichia coli or enterococcus concentration. For the samples that could be classified by bacteriophage genotyping, 78% agreed with the classification obtained from Bacteroidales markers.
Cap Z(36/32), a barbed end actin-capping protein, is a component of the Z-line of skeletal muscle

Various biological activities have been attributed to actin-capping proteins based on their in vitro effects on actin filaments. However, there is little direct evidence for their in vivo activities. In this paper, we show that Cap Z(36/32), a barbed end, actin-capping protein isolated from muscle (Casella, J. F., D. J. Maack, and S. Lin, 1986, J. Biol. Chem., 261:10915-10921) is localized to the barbed ends of actin filaments by electron microscopy and to the Z-line of chicken skeletal muscle by indirect immunofluorescence and electron microscopy. Since actin filaments associate with the Z-line at their barbed ends, these findings suggest that Cap Z(36/32) may play a role in regulating length, orienting, or attaching actin filaments to Z-discs.
When the President Speaks…

The theory of presidential influence over public opinion is used to predict the impact of presidential rhetoric on the public’s concern regarding drug use as “the most important problem (MIP) facing the nation. ” It is hypothesized that the more attention presidents give to the policy area of drugs in their state of the union (SOTU) addresses, the more concerned the public becomes with drug use. Using a time-series regression analysis of data collected from a content analysis of presidents’SOTU speeches regressed on the Gallup Poll’s MIP series from 1946 to 2010, the findings suggest that presidential mentions of drugs in the SOTU addresses influence public concern for illicit drugs in America.
Geometric morphometrics of male facial shape in relation to physical strength and perceived attractiveness, dominance, and masculinity

Evolutionary psychologists claim that women have adaptive preferences for specific male physical traits. Physical strength may be one of those traits, because recent research suggests that women rate faces of physically strong men as more masculine, dominant, and attractive. Yet, previous research has been limited in its ability to statistically map specific male facial shapes and features to corresponding physical measures (e.g., strength) and ratings (e.g., attractiveness).
DEVS / RMI — AnAuto-Adaptive and Reconfigurable Distributed Simulation Environment for Engineering Studies

With the increased demand for distributed simulation and testing environments to support large-scale modeling and simulation applications, much research has focused on developing a software environment to support simulation across a heterogeneous computing networks. In this paper, a new implementation of the DEVS formalism called DEVS/RMI system is presented as a natively distributed simulation system based on standard implementation of DEVS. Our objective is to distribute simulation entities across network nodes seamlessly without any of the commonly used middleware. The DEVS/RMI system is also built to support auto-adaptive and reconfiguration of simulations during run-time. Because Java RMI supports the synchronization of local objects with remote ones, no additional simulation time management needs to be added when distributing the simulators to remote nodes. The DEVS/RMI approach is well suited for complex, computationally intensive testing programs such as the Joint Interoperability Test Command’s 6016C standards conformance testing project. The effort and resources required to work in other more traditional High Performance computing environments such as MPI or PVM make development of many simulations tests an unacceptably slow process. In contrast, DEVS/RMI provides an extremely flexible and efficient software development environment for rapid development of tests. A test case of a large-scale dynamic 2D-Cell space model is discussed and presented in this paper to show how the dynamic re-configuration capabilities can be applied to simulations of concern to the test and evaluation community.
IBM Research Report Iterative Estimation Maximization for Stochastic Linear and Convex Programs with Conditional-Value-at-Risk Constraints

We present a new algorithm, Iterative Estimation Ma ximization (IEM), for stochastic linear and convex programs with Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) cons traints. IEM iteratively constructs a sequence of compact-sized linear, or convex, optimization probl ems, and solves them sequentially to find the optim al solution. The problem size IEM solves in each itera tion is unaffected by the size of random samples, w hich makes it extreme efficient for real-world, large-sc ale problems. We prove that IEM converges to the tr u optimal solution, and give a lower bound on the num ber of samples required to probabilistically satisf y a CVaR constraint. Experiments show that IEM is an or der of magnitude faster than the best known algorithm on large problem instances.
Method of Presentation and Sex Differences When Using a Revised Figural Drawing Scale to Measure Body Size Estimation and Dissatisfaction

The present study examined whether a revision of the Gardner, Jappe, and Gardner (2009) BIAS-BD figural drawing scale gave more accurate estimations of body size estimation and body dissatisfaction than a prior version. It also examined whether the order of figure presentation led to differing values for body size estimation and body dissatisfaction. The revised BIAS–BD scale included a continuous line beneath 17 figural drawings ordered in either ascending or descending size. Results were compared with previous studies using the original scale in which the 17 figural drawings were presented in a random order and, additionally, with a method using an adjustable video image by which the participants estimated their perceived body size by adjusting the width of their static image. The scale was presented to 330 undergraduate university students, including 199 women and 131 men. Overall, compared to BMIs calculated from the participants' reports of their height and weight, men and women participants gave less accurate estimations of body size using the revised scale when compared to the original BIAS–BD scale and video methodology. Participants reported significantly less body dissatisfaction than with the original scale. There was no significant difference in body size estimation when the figures were presented in ascending or descending size. Body dissatisfaction was greater for women than men, and when the figures were presented in descending order. Methodological considerations for using figural drawing scales in body image research are discussed.
A New Approach to Stadium Experience: The Dynamics of the Sensoryscape, Social Interaction, and Sense of Home

The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable, valid instrument of the sensory experiences of sport attendees. The initial scale development study (N = 263) identified 22-items to represent five dimensions of the sensoryscape. The Sensoryscape scale was confirmed as a reliable scale using CFA. SEM was used in a study of scale validity. The sensoryscape, social interaction, and sense of home each had a positive, direct impact on fans’ satisfaction for both major (N = 259) and minor (N = 218) league venues. Satisfaction with the stadium experience, in turn, had a positive, direct impact on intention to revisit. Similar models were confirmed for both contexts; however the magnitude of effects varied. Implications for sport marketing practice and future research are discussed.
The Salmonella Mutagenicity Assay: The Stethoscope of Genetic Toxicology for the 21st Century

Objectives According to the 2007 National Research Council report Toxicology for the Twenty-First Century, modern methods (e.g., “omics,” in vitro assays, high-throughput testing, computational methods) will lead to the emergence of a new approach to toxicology. The Salmonella mammalian microsome mutagenicity assay has been central to the field of genetic toxicology since the 1970s. Here we document the paradigm shifts engendered by the assay, the validation and applications of the assay, and how the assay is a model for future in vitro toxicology assays. Data sources We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Knowledge using key words relevant to the Salmonella assay and additional genotoxicity assays. Data extraction We merged the citations, removing duplicates, and categorized the papers by year and topic. Data synthesis The Salmonella assay led to two paradigm shifts: that some carcinogens were mutagens and that some environmental samples (e.g., air, water, soil, food, combustion emissions) were mutagenic. Although there are > 10,000 publications on the Salmonella assay, covering tens of thousands of agents, data on even more agents probably exist in unpublished form, largely as proprietary studies by industry. The Salmonella assay is a model for the development of 21st century in vitro toxicology assays in terms of the establishment of standard procedures, ability to test various agents, transferability across laboratories, validation and testing, and structure–activity analysis. Conclusions Similar to a stethoscope as a first-line, inexpensive tool in medicine, the Salmonella assay can serve a similar, indispensable role in the foreseeable future of 21st century toxicology.