Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Age and Gender on White Matter Integrity

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: DTI provides a sensitive measure of change in the microstructure of white matter integrity. The purpose of our study was to investigate age-related changes, sex differences, and age-by-sex interactions in white matter integrity (FA, AD, and RD) across the whole brain with a large sample. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 857 healthy subjects (mean age = 56.1 ± 9.9 years; age range = 24.9–84.8 years) were included in this study. All subjects were scanned at 3T. With use of TBSS, we examined the effects of age and sex on FA, AD, and RD in the white matter. RESULTS: Global FA was negatively correlated with age (R2 = 0.18, P < .0001), and global AD and RD were positively correlated with age (AD: R2 = 0.02, P < .0001; RD: R2 = 0.19, P < .0001). The correlation between age and global AD, however, was weak. Voxelwise analysis revealed a number of regions where FA was negatively correlated with age, with most of these regions showing a significant positive correlation between RD and age. There was a significant age-related FA increase in several white matter regions. Voxelwise analysis also revealed many regions where FA, AD, or RD differed between men and women; however, no region showed a significant interaction between age and sex. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that age-related changes in white matter integrity are more strongly associated with myelin sheath degeneration than with axonal degeneration, and that, in some specific regions, the number of remyelinated axons might increase with age. Our results also suggest that there are no sex differences in the aging process of the white matter.
The ancestral role of ATP hydrolysis in type II topoisomerases: prevention of DNA double-strand breaks

Type II DNA topoisomerases (topos) catalyse changes in DNA topology by passing one double-stranded DNA segment through another. This reaction is essential to processes such as replication and transcription, but carries with it the inherent danger of permanent double-strand break (DSB) formation. All type II topos hydrolyse ATP during their reactions; however, only DNA gyrase is able to harness the free energy of hydrolysis to drive DNA supercoiling, an energetically unfavourable process. A long-standing puzzle has been to understand why the majority of type II enzymes consume ATP to support reactions that do not require a net energy input. While certain type II topos are known to ‘simplify’ distributions of DNA topoisomers below thermodynamic equilibrium levels, the energy required for this process is very low, suggesting that this behaviour is not the principal reason for ATP hydrolysis. Instead, we propose that the energy of ATP hydrolysis is needed to control the separation of protein–protein interfaces and prevent the accidental formation of potentially mutagenic or cytotoxic DSBs. This interpretation has parallels with the actions of a variety of molecular machines that catalyse the conformational rearrangement of biological macromolecules.
[Study on p53, mdm-2 and p21WAF1 protein expression in ER-positive and ER-negative human breast cancer cell lines and its relation to biological features].

OBJECTIVE To study p53, mdm-2 and p21WAF1 protein expression levels in ER-positive and ER-negative human breast cancer cell lines and their relations to biological features. METHODS Using cell culture, DNA stable transfection and immunohistochemical methods, the protein expression levels of p53, mdm-2 and WAF1 genes in ER-positive expressing wtp53 MCF-7 cells, ER-negative expressing mtp53 MDA-MB-231 cells and ER-transfected MDA-MB-231 cells were determined, and then, their relation to biological features were compared. RESULTS (1) The function and expression of p53 protein of MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells were obviously different. The expression levels of mdm-2 and p21WAF1 proteins in MCF-7 cells were higher than those of MDA-MB-231 cells (P < 0.05), The biological features of the former were more favorable than those of the latter. (2) The ER-transfected MDA-MB-231 cells showed lower expression of mtp53 and higher expression of mdm-2 protein (P < 0.05), but no significant difference from that of p21WAF1 protein (P > 0.05). Meanwhile, biological features leading to favorable prognosis were manifested. CONCLUSION The ER status of breast cancer cell lines is related to the expression level of p53 and mdm-2 proteins and the biological features.
Group flocking of multiple mobile agents

In this paper, we consider group flocking of multi-agent systems in which agents are dispersed to different subgroups. By using local information, the flocking algorithms are proposed to solve group flocking problem in heterogeneous and homogeneous networks, respectively. For each given algorithm, the corresponding criterions are established to ensure both velocity alignment, cohesion of each subgroup, and collision avoidance between any two agents in the whole group. The proposed protocol can be modified to realize the division of agents into any pre-assigned number of subgroups, while solves the traditional flocking problem for each subgroup. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical results.
High levels of cyclic‐di‐GMP in plant‐associated P seudomonas correlate with evasion of plant immunity

Summary The plant innate immune system employs plasma membrane‐localized receptors that specifically perceive pathogen/microbe‐associated molecular patterns (PAMPs/MAMPs). This induces a defence response called pattern‐triggered immunity (PTI) to fend off pathogen attack. Commensal bacteria are also exposed to potential immune recognition and must employ strategies to evade and/or suppress PTI to successfully colonize the plant. During plant infection, the flagellum has an ambiguous role, acting as both a virulence factor and also as a potent immunogen as a result of the recognition of its main building block, flagellin, by the plant pattern recognition receptors (PRRs), including FLAGELLIN SENSING2 (FLS2). Therefore, strict control of flagella synthesis is especially important for plant‐associated bacteria. Here, we show that cyclic‐di‐GMP [bis‐(3′‐5′)‐cyclic di‐guanosine monophosphate], a central regulator of bacterial lifestyle, is involved in the evasion of PTI. Elevated cyclic‐di‐GMP levels in the pathogen P seudomonas syringae pv. tomato (P to) DC3000, the opportunist P . aeruginosa PAO1 and the commensal P . protegens Pf‐5 inhibit flagellin synthesis and help the bacteria to evade FLS2‐mediated signalling in N icotiana benthamiana and A rabidopsis thaliana. Despite this, high cellular cyclic‐di‐GMP concentrations were shown to drastically reduce the virulence of P to DC3000 during plant infection. We propose that this is a result of reduced flagellar motility and/or additional pleiotropic effects of cyclic‐di‐GMP signalling on bacterial behaviour.
Exploiting the Cloud Control Plane for Fun and Profit

Cloud providers typically charge for their services. There are diverse pricing models which often follow a pay-per-use paradigm. The consumers' payments are expected to cover all cost which incurs to the provider for processing, storage, bandwidth, data centre operation and engineering efforts, among others. In contrast, the consumer management interfaces are free of charge as they are expected to cause only a minority of the load compared to the actual computing services. With new service models and more complex and powerful management abilities, it is time to rethink this decision. The paper shows how to exploit the control plane of AWS Lambda to implement stateful services practically for free and under some circumstances even guaranteed for free which if widely deployed would cause a monetary loss for the provider. It also elaborates on the consistency model for AWS Lambda.
Epistemic Pragmatism: And Other Studies in the Theory of Knowledge

Preface Epistemic Pragmatism Linguistic Pragmatism On Cognitive Finitude and Limitations On Cognitive Economics The Uneasy Union of Ideality and Pragmatism in Inquiry On Inconsistency and Provisional Acceptance On Realism and the Problem of Transparent Facts On Fallacies of Aggregation Leibniz and the Conditions of Identity Worldly Woes: The Trouble with Possible Worlds Trigraphs: A Resource for Illustration In Philosophy Fragmentation and Disintegration in Philosophy (Its Grounds and it Implications).
A Random Road Network Model and Its Effects on Topological Characteristics of Mobile Delay-Tolerant Networks

Road networks have significant impact on mobility and network characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks. Discovering their characteristics and effects on mobility and network performance in urban environments is a fundamental research task. In this paper, we firstly study the graph attributes of road networks by sampling real road networks in main cities of Europe and USA. We propose a new graph metric, called characteristic central length, in order to estimate the average shortest-path length of a large-scale spatial network. We find that real road networks from Europe and USA have different patterns with regard to some graph attributes and a simple grid model is inadequate to describe them. Considering the diverse patterns of urban road networks caused by obstacles and shortcuts, we propose a random road network model, called the GRE model. The model is validated through fitting it to real road network samples using a genetic algorithm and simulation of delay-tolerant networks. The simulation results have shown that by extending the grid model with new probabilistic parameters, the GRE model has better capability on approximating real road networks. The simulation results have also shown that delay-tolerant networks operating on road networks may have better performance than scenarios without road networks.
Differentiation of Pluripotent Embryonic Stem Cells Into Cardiomyocytes

Abstract— Embryonic stem (ES) cells have been established as permanent lines of undifferentiated pluripotent cells from early mouse embryos. ES cells provide a unique system for the genetic manipulation and the creation of knockout strains of mice through gene targeting. By cultivation in vitro as 3D aggregates called embryoid bodies, ES cells can differentiate into derivatives of all 3 primary germ layers, including cardiomyocytes. Protocols for the in vitro differentiation of ES cells into cardiomyocytes representing all specialized cell types of the heart, such as atrial-like, ventricular-like, sinus nodal–like, and Purkinje-like cells, have been established. During differentiation, cardiac-specific genes as well as proteins, receptors, and ion channels are expressed in a developmental continuum, which closely recapitulates the developmental pattern of early cardiogenesis. Exploitation of ES cell–derived cardiomyocytes has facilitated the analysis of early cardiac development and has permitted in vitro “gain-of-function” or “loss-of-function” genetic studies. Recently, human ES cell lines have been established that can be used to investigate cardiac development and the function of human heart cells and to determine the basic strategies of regenerative cell therapy. This review summarizes the current state of ES cell–derived cardiogenesis and provides an overview of how genomic strategies coupled with this in vitro differentiation system can be applied to cardiac research.
3D Articulated Models and Multiview Tracking with Physical Forces

We present a method to automatically estimate the motion of an articulated object filmed by two or more fixed cameras. We focus our work on the case where the quality of the images is poor, and where only an approximation of a geometric model of the tracked object is available. Our technique uses physical forces applied to each rigid part of a kinematic 3D model of the object we are tracking. These forces guide the minimization of the differences between the pose of the 3D model and the pose of the real object in the video images. We use a fast recursive algorithm to solve the dynamical equations of motion of any 3D articulated model. We explain the key parts of our algorithms: how a relevant information is extracted from the images, how the forces are created, and how the dynamical equations of motion are solved. A study of what kind of information should be extracted in the images, and of when our algorithms fail is also presented. Finally we present some results about the tracking of a person. We also show the application of our method to the tracking of a hand in sequences of images, showing that the kind of informations to extract from the images depends on their quality and of the configuration of the cameras.
Affective Policy Performance Evaluation Model: A Case of an International Trade Policy Implementation

Firms often superficially adopt policies because of governmental rules and regulations, so as to avoid penalties or to gain benefits. However, the evaluation and characterization of those kinds of adoptions as policy performance distorts the true level of policy performance: social sustainability. This study proposes an affective policy performance evaluation model. The attitudes of employees toward adopting a policy are characterized into genuine and superficial compliance. Their behaviors are explained through voluntary and opportunistic adoptions. In order to validate the proposed model, a survey was conducted on an international trade policy target group (n = 216) for the Strategic Trade Control System (STCS), in order to understand their attitudes toward adopting the policy. The survey data was analyzed by a structural equation modeling method. The measures of the factors in the proposed model are adopted and modified from existing studies. The most effective resources of policy implementation on the firms’ genuine and superficial compliance and ultimately on the firms’ voluntary policy adoption are revealed through the analysis. Based on the results, this study presents a strategy for allocating and managing policy implementation resources to exclusively encourage firms’ trade policy adoptions.
Hedging Ideally with Realized Covariance December

In view of the recent documented hedging bias attributable to failing to accommodate volatility long memory, we suggest to use the simple, yet superior, realized variancecovariance (RVCOV) in dynamic hedging. For its incremental value from intradaily information, model-free and inherent long memory, RVCOV has been shown to be accurate without misspecification bias and easily generalized to high dimensions in financial applications. Examining the hedging performance for S&P500 spot position with futures contract across different parametric bivariate GARCH models and RVCOV approach shows that all methods can remove over 90% risks, though, RVCOV overwhelmingly dominates all parametric models for its almost perfect hedge. Further reality check using ex-ante one-step-ahead forecasts indicate that the realized optimal hedge ratio based on simple ARMA(1,1) RVCOV forecasts outperforms ideally. ∗Corresponding author: Jin-Huei Yeh, Department of Finance, National Central University, Email: jhyeh@ncu.edu. tw; Tel: 886.3. 422.7151 ext. 66255. Fax: 886.3. 425.2961. Address: 300, Jhongda Rd., Jhongli City, Taiwan 32001. Hedging Ideally with Realized Covariance
Squibs and Discussions Reliability measurement without limits

In computational linguistics, a reliability measurement of 0.8 on some statistic such as κ is widely thought to guarantee that hand-coded data is fit for purpose, with 0.67 to 0.8 tolerable, and lower values suspect. We demonstrate that the main use of such data, machine learning, can tolerate data with low reliability as long as any disagreement among human coders looks like random noise. When the disagreement introduces patterns, however, the machine learner can pick these up just like they pick up the real patterns in the data, making the performance figures look better than they really are. For the range of reliability measures that the field currently accepts, disagreement can appreciably inflate performance figures, and even a measure of 0.8 does not guarantee that what looks like good performance really is. Although this is a common sense result, it has implications for how we work. At the very least, computational linguists should look for any patterns in the disagreement among coders and assess what impact they will have.
European Integration and Political Conflict: Varieties of capitalism and political divides over European integration

Under its umbrella, the European Union covers countries with highly diverse configurations of capitalist political-economic institutions. In the macro-level political economy literature these differences have led scholars to generate a number of hypotheses about the relative gains or losses of individual member countries from important institutional innovations that advance integration, such as the formation of the European Central Bank and a common currency (cf. Hall and Franzese 1998; Iversen 1998). Moreover, individual citizens and labor market participants may perceive costs and benefits differently, contingent upon national wagebargaining systems or welfare state policies. Domestic political divides between advocates and opponents ofEU integration may play out differently and yield contrasting partisan alignments if polities are embedded in different institutional "varieties" of capitalism. In this chapter, we explore how the diversity of capitalist institutions affects political contestation over EU integration in two respects. First, capitalist institutions affect the proportion of voters in each country who have an incentive to challenge EU integration. In other words, political economy shapes the "grievance level" that may provide the raw material of patterns of domestic contestation. Contingent upon existing national economic institutions, citizens calculate how their benefits (in terms of jobs, income growth, etc.) are likely to be affected collectively for most voters ("sociotropic" calculations). Second, they also may focus on their potential individual benefits and costs that result from changes in the expected economic payoffs induced by the consequences of European integration for national political-economic institutions. Here citizens' general political ideology and their individual asset endowments in labor markets may produce domestic alignments of conflict over European integration ("egocentric" voting). How ideology and assets affect such alignments may be contingent upon domestic political-economic institutions. Whether citizens are leaning toward or away from further European integration does not simply depend on whether they are "left" or "right," but whether they are left or right within a particular national
Planning tangling motions for humanoids

There are not much methods for humanoid robots to path-plan movements such as piggyback-carry, firefighter-lift or giving a shoulder to support the gait of another. Such methods are essential to apply humanoid robots for rescuing people in emergency, or for taking care of injured/elderly people in the hospital. It is difficult to plan such motions as they require the limbs of the humanoids to be tangled. In this paper, we propose a new method to plan such movements using a criteria based on the Gauss linking integral (GLI). The user first specifies the target configurations of the humanoids. The system then detects the tangles made between the bodies, and then plans how the humanoids should move to arrive to the target posture from separate configurations. The motion get entangled is planned by the rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) expansion. Using our method, it is possible to path-plan complex tangling motions which were difficult by previous methods.
A Four-Tier Annotated Urdu Handwritten Text Image Dataset for Multidisciplinary Research on Urdu Script

This article introduces a large handwritten text document image corpus dataset for Urdu script named CALAM (Cursive And Language Adaptive Methodologies). The database contains unconstrained handwritten sentences along with their structural annotations for the offline handwritten text images with their XML representation. Urdu is the fourth most frequently used language in the world, but due to its complex cursive writing script and low resources, it is still a thrust area for document image analysis. Here, a unified approach is applied in the development of an Urdu corpus by collecting printed texts, handwritten texts, and demographic information of writers on a single form. CALAM contains 1,200 handwritten text images, 3,043 lines, 46,664 words, and 101,181 ligatures. For capturing maximum variance among the words and handwritten styles, data collection is distributed among six categories and 14 subcategories. Handwritten forms were filled out by 725 different writers belonging to different geographical regions, ages, and genders with diverse educational backgrounds. A structure has been designed to annotate handwritten Urdu script images at line, word, and ligature levels with an XML standard to provide a ground truth of each image at different levels of annotation. This corpus would be very useful for linguistic research in benchmarking and providing a testbed for evaluation of handwritten text recognition techniques for Urdu script, signature verification, writer identification, digital forensics, classification of printed and handwritten text, categorization of texts as per use, and so on. The experimental results of some recently developed handwritten text line segmentation techniques experimented on the proposed dataset are also presented in the article for asserting its viability and usability.
Reconsidering the H&E stain as the gold standard in assessing the depth of burn wounds

While histological examination is considered by most as the gold standard for burn depth assessment, it has no practical use in the clinical setting. It has, however, been used in the research setting, as a mean for evaluating emerging techniques of depth measurement. Due to the limitations of the H&E stain, other stains have also been explored, such as lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), as presented in this issue, in “Improving the Histologic Characterization of Burn Depth. ” As the determination of burn depth is not a typical subject in dermatopathology, a summary of selected techniques and the possible role for the LDH stain in future research, is described herein.
A Pragmatic Approach to Robot Rescue: The Keystone Fire Brigade

The Keystone Fire Brigade is a robotic rescue team that has competed in the 2002 competitions in both Fukuoka (RoboCup) and Edmonton (AAAI). The key elements of our approach are emphasis on autonomy, vision-based computing, and implementation on inexpensive robot bases (e.g., toy cars). This paper describes our motivations in developing the Keystone Fire Brigade and describes the key elements of the design: the hardware employed and the visual processing algorithms used for localization and victim identification. We also describe our experiences in the test domains.
Web Mining Using Cloud Computing

In this paper I present the technology of cloud computing using web mining . Web mining include how to extract the useful information from the web and gain knowledge using data mining techniques. Here so many online resources are available i.e. web content mining and access through the web servers. Web mining techniques and applications are much needed in cloud computing . The implementation of these techniques through cloud computing will allow users to retrieve relevant and meaningful data from virtually integrated data warehouse which reduces cost and infrastructure.