Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ubr3, a Novel Modulator of Hh Signaling Affects the Degradation of Costal-2 and Kif7 through Poly-ubiquitination

Hedgehog (Hh) signaling regulates multiple aspects of metazoan development and tissue homeostasis, and is constitutively active in numerous cancers. We identified Ubr3, an E3 ubiquitin ligase, as a novel, positive regulator of Hh signaling in Drosophila and vertebrates. Hh signaling regulates the Ubr3-mediated poly-ubiquitination and degradation of Cos2, a central component of Hh signaling. In developing Drosophila eye discs, loss of ubr3 leads to a delayed differentiation of photoreceptors and a reduction in Hh signaling. In zebrafish, loss of Ubr3 causes a decrease in Shh signaling in the developing eyes, somites, and sensory neurons. However, not all tissues that require Hh signaling are affected in zebrafish. Mouse UBR3 poly-ubiquitinates Kif7, the mammalian homologue of Cos2. Finally, loss of UBR3 up-regulates Kif7 protein levels and decreases Hh signaling in cultured cells. In summary, our work identifies Ubr3 as a novel, evolutionarily conserved modulator of Hh signaling that boosts Hh in some tissues.
Theory of mind: understanding young children's pretence and mental states

For more than two decades, research has focused on the understanding of pretence as an important means for young children to conceptualise the mind. Many use the phrase ‘mental representation’ to a mental model of some entity or concept, which describes what is inside the minds of young children in relation to a real-world situation or object. Studies indicate a strong relationship between the children's ability to engage in pretence and their ability to understand the minds of others, which many refer to as theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to ascribe mental states (e.g. beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge) to oneself and others as well as to recognise that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from one's own. The metarepresentational theory of pretence indicates the beginning of the emerging ability to develop mental states. The cognitivist theoretical account focuses on the representational mechanisms underlying pretence. It also makes it possible for researchers to examine in some detail the children's thought processes during pretence, which contributes to systematic generalisations on the relationship between pretence and theory of mind. The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical description and background on the cognitive theory of pretence. This framework expands the young children's ability of representation, generating the ability for metarepresentation. This model also supports pretence as an early expression of the ability to understand mental states, which motivates them to pretend and to understand pretence in others. Then the article describes and provides examples of pretence in relation to mental representation, theory of mind, and mental states. Finally, it summarises the understanding of children's pretence, mental states, and theory of mind.
[Comorbid disorders of the attention deficit with hyperactivity disorder].

OBJECTIVE To show the comorbid pathology associated with the attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during the pediatric and adult ages. PATIENTS AND METHODS We use the disorders included by the international literature as the most frequents. There are included as main disorders: problems of affectivity, learning disabilities, dyslexia, vehicle driving problems, anxiety, bipolar disorder, motor coordination problems, tics and Tourette syndrome, oppositional defiant disorder, impulsive aggressive, antisocial behavior, and predisposition to delinquency, and to be alcohol and drugs abusers. CONCLUSION The presence of comorbid disorders in the ADHD may show a higher severity of the disorder which makes that many of these subjects to be predisposed to be in contact with psychiatrics, policemen and justice during the entire life.
Design Science Research in Information Systems

Information Systems are purposefully designed human-machine artifacts that significantly impact people, organizations, and society. Two paradigms characterize research in this discipline: behavioral (or natural) science and design science. Whereas the behavioral science paradigm seeks to discover and verify laws or principles that explain or predict human or social behavior, the design science paradigm seeks to extend the boundaries of human and social capabilities by creating new and innovative artifacts. Such artifacts can so affect human and organizational behavior that previously posited behavioral laws are rendered irrelevant or inapplicable . We develop a framework for understanding, executing, and evaluating design science research in the Information Systems field and present guidelines for its conduct and evaluation. Recent exemplars are used to demonstrate the utility of these guidelines. We conclude with a call for an effective integration of the design science paradigm into the Information Systems research community.
Objective Quality Assessment of Image Retargeting by Incorporating Fidelity Measures and Inconsistency Detection

The tremendous growth in mobile devices has resulted in huge generation and usage of digital images. Image quality assessment is thus an important issue for mobile media applications. In this paper, we focus on the quality evaluation of images generated by content-aware image retargeting, in which the reference and the distorted images are of different sizes. Through retargeting, many types of deformation inconsistency lead to shape distortion, deformation artifacts, and content information loss, worsening its perceptual quality. The deformation inconsistency occurs on different levels of the retargeted images. Limited by the accuracy of the alignment between the original and retargeted images, previous methods only focus on pixel-level and patch-level fidelity analyses and fail to detect deformation inconsistency. In this paper, we improve the alignment algorithm and propose a three-level representation of the retargeting process. Based on the analysis of this three-level representation, both fidelity measures and inconsistency detection are combined to determine the final retargeting quality. The proposed algorithm is validated on the public data sets RetargetMe and CUHK. Experimental results demonstrate that inconsistency detection contributes to accurately assessing the image retargeting perceptual quality. This inspires us to investigate more about deformation inconsistency to formulate the objective quality of image retargeting.
Joint training for open-domain extraction on the web: exploiting overlap when supervision is limited

We consider the problem of jointly training structured models for extraction from multiple web sources whose records enjoy partial content overlap. This has important applications in open-domain extraction, e.g. a user materializing a table of interest from multiple relevant unstructured sources; or a site like Freebase augmenting an incomplete relation by extracting more rows from web sources. Such applications require extraction over arbitrary domains, so one cannot use a pre-trained extractor or demand a huge labeled dataset. We propose to overcome this lack of supervision by using content overlap across the related web sources. Existing methods of exploiting overlap have been developed under settings that do not generalize easily to the scale and diversity of overlap seen on Web sources. We present an agreement-based learning framework that jointly trains the models by biasing them to agree on the agreement regions, i.e. shared text segments. We present alternatives within our framework to trade-off tractability, robustness to noise, and extent of agreement enforced; and propose a scheme of partitioning agreement regions that leads to efficient training while maximizing overall accuracy. Further, we present a principled scheme to discover low-noise agreement regions in unlabeled data across multiple sources. Through extensive experiments over 58 different extraction domains, we establish that our framework provides significant boosts over uncoupled training, and scores over alternatives such as collective inference, staged training, and multi-view learning.
Towards lean product and process development

Successes in lean manufacture have led researchers and practitioners to consider extending ‘lean’ to different parts of the engineering enterprise, including product and process development (PPD). Lean product development (PD) has been understood to mean lean manufacture applied to PD, while the roots of lean PD – just like lean manufacture – go back to Toyota. This article presents the methodology adopted in order to pave the way towards a coherent lean PD model that combines lessons from the Toyota product development system (TPDS) with other best practises. The article provides a unique review of the lean PD research area, and a reference framework for the enablers that Toyota has employed for lean PD. An investigation of five engineering enterprises undertaken to search for evidence of the implementation of lean PD enablers through observation, document analysis and interviews is also presented. Some enablers have been informally applied, while few have been formally implemented, and no model was found to formally combine lean PD enablers into a coherent whole. This is the first article to critique attempts to describe lean PD and provide a definition for Lean PD.
Thing as a Service Interoperability: Review and Framework Proposal

Internet of things (IoT) is global network of interconnected entities aimed at automating our lives. However, a number of IoT devices and systems have been created in parallel and there is no universal coding language and communication protocol. For this reason, IoT interoperability is a complex research and practical problem. In this work, we review existing work about IoT interoperability and IoT ontologies. Next, we propose a framework for things as a service interoperability that includes composition of different sensors and actuators at service level, and their integration with existing cloud services. The proposed framework consists of four main layers: virtual sensor, service, semantic, and interoperability layer. We plan to use the proposed framework to achieve service-level interoperability of smart things that will be semantically annotated in order to describe their functional and non-functional properties (with special emphasis on security and privacy).
Construct Validation of a Strategy Model of Student Self-Regulated Learning

Using student interviews, teacher ratings, and achievement test outcomes, we validated a strategy model of student self-regulated learning as a theoretical construct. Forty-four male and 36 female high school students were asked to describe their use of 14 self-regulated learning strategies in six contexts, and their teachers rated these students for their self-regulated learning during class. Factor analyses of the teachers' ratings along with students' scores on a standardized test of mathematics and English revealed a single self-regulated learning factor that accounted for nearly 80% of the explained variance and two smaller factors that were labeled Student Verbal Expressiveness and Achievement. Students' reports of using self-regulated learning strategies during a structured interview correlated . 70 with the obtained teachers' rating factor and were negatively related to the Student Verbal Expressiveness and Achievement Factors. Our results indicate both convergent and discriminative validity for a self-regulated learning construct. An important new topic of research in student academic functioning has been termed self-regulated learning (Corno, 1986; Henderson, 1986; McCombs, 1986; Schunk, 1986; Wang & Peverly, 1986). Although interest in this topic has diverse theoretical origins, a common conceptualization of students has emerged as metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process (Zimmerman, 1986). In terms of metacognitive processes, self-regulated learners plan, organize, self-instruct, and selfevaluate at various stages during the acquisition process. From a motivational vantage, self-regulated learners perceive themselves as self-efficacious, autonomous, and intrinsically motivated. In terms of behavior, self-regulated learners select, structure, and even create social and physical environments that optimize acquisition. According to this view, effective learners become aware of functional relations between their patterns of thought and action (often termed strategies) and social and environmental outcomes. There is a growing research literature indicating the importance of students' use of self-regulate d learning strategies. Recently Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons (1986) proposed a model that comprised 14 categories of self-regulated learning strategies that high school students use during class and study. These strategies included self-evaluation (Bandura & Cervone,
Household Levels of Nitrogen Dioxide and Pediatric Asthma Severity

Background: Adverse respiratory effects in children with asthma are associated with exposures to nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Levels indoors can be much higher than outdoors. Primary indoor sources of NO2 are gas stoves, which are used for cooking by one-third of U.S. households. We investigated the effects of indoor NO2 exposure on asthma severity among an ethnically and economically diverse sample of children, controlling for season and indoor allergen exposure. Methods: Children 5–10 years of age with active asthma (n = 1,342) were recruited through schools in urban and suburban Connecticut and Massachusetts (2006–2009) for a prospective, year-long study with seasonal measurements of NO2 and asthma severity. Exposure to NO2 was measured passively for four, month-long, periods with Palmes tubes. Asthma morbidity was concurrently measured by a severity score and frequency of wheeze, night symptoms, and use of rescue medication. We used adjusted, hierarchical ordered logistic regression models to examine associations between household NO2 exposure and health outcomes. Results: Every 5-fold increase in NO2 exposure above a threshold of 6 ppb was associated with a dose-dependent increase in risk of higher asthma severity score (odds ratio = 1.37 [95% confidence interval = 1.01–1.89]), wheeze (1.49 [1.09–2.03]), night symptoms (1.52 [1.16–2.00]), and rescue medication use (1.78 [1.33–2.38]). Conclusions: Asthmatic children exposed to NO2 indoors, at levels well below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency outdoor standard (53 ppb), are at risk for increased asthma morbidity. Risks are not confined to inner city children, but occur at NO2 concentrations common in urban and suburban homes.
Factors that promote progressive development of the osteoblast phenotype in cultured fetal rat calvaria cells

Rat calvaria osteoblasts derived from 21‐day‐old fetal rat pups undergo a temporal expression of markers of the osteoblast phenotype during a 5 week culture period. Alkaline phosphatase and osteocalcin are sequentially expressed in relation to collagen accumulation and mineralization. This pattern of expression of these osteoblast parameters in cultured rat osteoblasts (ROB) is analogous to that seen in vivo in developing fetal rat calvaria tissue (Yoon et. al: Biochem. Biophis. Res. Commun. 148:1129, 1987) and is similar to that observed in cultures of subcultivated 16‐day‐old embryonic chick calvaria‐derived osteoblasts (COB) (Gerstenfeld, et. al: Dev. Biol. 122:46, 1987). While the cellular organization of subcultivated COB and primary ROB cultures are somewhat different, the temporal expression of the parameters remains. Both the rat and chick culture systems support formation of matrix mineralization even in the absence of β‐glycerol‐phosphate. A systematic examination of factors which constitute conditions supporting complete expression of the osteoblast phenotype in ROB cultures indicate requirements for specific serum lots, ascorbic acid and the ordered deposition of mineral in the extracellular matrix. The present studies suggest that formation of a collagenous matrix, dependent on ascorbic acid, is requisite for expression of the osteoblast phenotype. In ROB cultures, expression of osteocalcin synthesis occurs subsequent to initiation of alkaline phosphatase activity and accompanies the formation of mineralized nodules. Thus, extracellular matrix mineralization (deposition of hydroxyapatite) is required for complete development of the osteoblast phenotype, as reflected by a 200‐fold increase in osteocalcin synthesis. These data show the temporal expression of the various osteoblast parameters during the formation and mineralization of an extracellular matrix can provide markers reflective of various stages of osteoblast differentiation/maturation in vitro.
The Fascination of Wisdom: Its Nature, Ontogeny, and Function

Wisdom has intrigued both scholars and laypersons since antiquity. On the one hand, its seemingly ethereal yet obvious qualities are timeless and universal. On the other hand, these same qualities are evolving and responsive to historical and cultural change. Novel societal and personal dilemmas emerge over time, and the ways and means to deal with recurring dilemmas are revisited and updated with prudence. Building on philosophical analyses of the role of theoretical and practical wisdom in good conduct and judgment about life matters, psychologists have begun to apply scientific methods to questions about the nature, function, and ontogeny of wisdom. We outline these research directions and focus on the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, which was one of the first attempts to bring wisdom into the laboratory. Future research on wisdom would profit from interdisciplinary collaboration and creative application of new methods drawn from developmental, social, and cognitive psychology.
Cell Therapy for Bone Disease: A Review of Current Status

Bone marrow is a reservoir of pluripotent stem/progenitor cells for mesenchymal tissues. Upon in vitro expansion, in vivo bone‐forming efficiency of bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) is dramatically lower in comparison with fresh bone marrow, and their in vitro multidifferentiation potentials are gradually lost. Nevertheless, when BMSCs are isolated and expanded in the presence of fibroblast growth factor 2, the percentage of cells able to differentiate into the osteogenic, chondrogenic, and adipogenic lineages is greater. Osteogenic progenitors are not exclusive to skeletal tissues. We could also think of cells in different adult tissues as potentially capable of following an osteochondrogenic differentiation pathway, but, under normal physiological conditions, they are inhibited in this process by the environment and/or the adjacent cell populations. When, for some reason such as pathology, the environment changes dramatically and the inhibiting condition is removed, these cells could become osteoblasts. Bone is repaired via local delivery of cells within a scaffold. Bone formation was first assessed in small animal models. Large animal models were successively developed to prove the feasibility of the tissue engineering approach in a model closer to a real clinical situation. Eventually, pilot clinical studies were performed. Extremely appealing is the possibility of using mesenchymal progenitors in the therapy of genetic bone diseases via systemic infusion. There is experimental evidence to suggest that mesenchymal progenitors delivered by this route engraft with a very low efficiency and do not produce relevant and durable clinical effects. Under some conditions, where the local microenvironment is either altered (i.e., injury) or under important remodeling processes (i.e., fetal growth), engraftment of stem and progenitor cells seems to be enhanced. A better understanding of their engraftment mechanisms will, hopefully, extend the field of therapeutic applications of mesenchymal progenitors.
High‐resolution sperm typing of meiotic recombination in the mouse MHC Eβ gene

Meiotic crossovers detected by pedigree analysis in the mouse MHC cluster into hotspots. To explore the properties of hotspots, we subjected the class II Eβ gene to high‐resolution sperm crossover analysis. We confirm the presence of a highly localized hotspot 1.0–1.6 kb wide in the second intron of Eβ and show that it is flanked by DNA which is almost completely recombinationally inert. Mice heterozygous for haplotype s and another MHC haplotype show major haplotype‐dependant variation in crossover rate but always the same hotspot, even in crosses including the highly diverged p haplotype. Crossovers in reciprocal orientations occur at similar rates but show different distributions across the hotspot, with the position of centre points in the two orientations shifted on average by 400 bp. This asymmetry results in crossover products showing biased gene conversion in favour of hotspot markers from the non‐initiating haplotype, and supports the double‐strand break repair model of recombination, with haplotype s as the most efficient crossover initiator. The detailed behaviour of the Eβ hotspot, including evidence for highly localized recombination initiation, is strikingly similar to human hotspots.
Mentoring adjunct faculty using the cornerstones of effective communication and practice

Online teaching in higher education is growing at an exponential rate and it will continue to escalate. Powerful tools of technology have been delivering instruction in unprecedented ways, yet these are only as effective as the masters of this craft. Those using technology to teach online in increasing numbers are educational leadership adjunct professors in particular. Adjunct faculty members can comprise most of or even all of a university department’s faculty and they often carry heavier responsibilities than regular faculty for distance education and hybrid instruction. Clearly, the time has come for colleges and universities with online programs to provide mentoring that assures the success of their greatest teaching force, its adjunct faculty. Herein the authors describe four primary needs, articulated as cornerstones, comprising effective mentoring programs for educational leadership adjuncts. Four cornerstones or vitally important elements for the successful online teaching experience of adjuncts faculty members are professional development, effective communication, fostering balance and forming relationships.
Involuntarily childless men and the desire for fatherhood

Objective: This study aims to explore the experience of childless men and the desire for fatherhood. Background: There is little research exploring the desire for fatherhood, with most studies concentrating on couples in infertility treatment. Of those, the majority focus on the women’s experience, a factor that may reflect the gender stereotype and cultural identification of childlessness to women. Methods: A qualitative approach was adopted. A convenience sample of 10 biologically childless men were recruited through the snowball method and interviewed individually. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and transcripts were then analysed using Grounded Theory. Results: A core category, ‘Lifescape’s of childless men: enduring anticipation and expectation in an uncharted world’, divided into three meta themes: Emotive Forces, Extant Agency, and Life Course. The desire for parenthood appeared to peak in the 30s, gradually reduced, but did not cease. The participants also revealed a sense of ‘outsiderness’ in familial, social, and work relationships. Conclusion: Involuntarily childless men reported similar experiences to those in, or who have had, infertility treatment. These included a sense of loss, depression, exclusion, isolation, and risk‐taking behaviour. Over the life course the men also found ways to adapt and reappraise their beliefs concerning themselves emotionally, psychologically and socially. To help understand this process, gender‐role therapy is presented as a possible approach for working with childless men.