Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cutaneous Retinoic Acid Levels Determine Hair Follicle Development and Downgrowth*

Background: Excess retinoic acid (RA) leads to hair loss, but the effect of RA during embryonic hair follicle development is unknown. Results: Mice lacking the RA-degrading enzyme Cyp26b1 in skin exhibit major hair follicle development defects. Conclusion: RA levels determine downgrowth and bending of the hair follicle. Significance: These data identify crucial developmental signaling pathways and transcriptional regulators as targets regulated by RA during hair follicle morphogenesis. Retinoic acid (RA) is essential during embryogenesis and for tissue homeostasis, whereas excess RA is well known as a teratogen. In humans, excess RA is associated with hair loss. In the present study, we demonstrate that specific levels of RA, regulated by Cyp26b1, one of the RA-degrading enzymes, are required for hair follicle (hf) morphogenesis. Mice with embryonic ablation of Cyp26b1 (Cyp26b1−/−) have excessive endogenous RA, resulting in arrest of hf growth at the hair germ stage. The altered hf development is rescued by grafting the mutant skin on immunodeficient mice. Our results show that normalization of RA levels is associated with reinitiation of hf development. Conditional deficiency of Cyp26b1 in the dermis (En1Cre;Cyp26b1f/−) results in decreased hair follicle density and specific effect on hair type, indicating that RA levels also influence regulators of hair bending. Our results support the model of RA-dependent dermal signals regulating hf downgrowth and bending. To elucidate target gene pathways of RA, we performed microarray and RNA-Seq profiling of genes differentially expressed in Cyp26b1−/− skin and En1Cre;Cyp26b1f/− tissues. We show specific effects on the Wnt-catenin pathway and on members of the Runx, Fox, and Sox transcription factor families, indicating that RA modulates pathways and factors implicated in hf downgrowth and bending. Our results establish that proper RA distribution is essential for morphogenesis, development, and differentiation of hfs.
Climate change, rice production, and migration in Vietnamese households

This paper analyses the relationship between climate and migration in rural households in Vietnam. We propose an instrumental variable approach that controls for the potential endogeneity between crop production and migration using monthly minimum temperatures in the growing season as an instrument of rice production. Results show that the rise in minimum temperature during the core month of the growing season (i.e. June) does cause a reduction in rice production which, in turn, has a positive impact on people's propensity to migrate. This finding is robust to the use of different estimators and plausible violations to exogeneity of the instrument.
Investigation on Thermal Conductivity and Ac Impedance of Graphite Suspension Investigation on Thermal Conductivity and Ac Impedance of Graphite Suspension Acknowledgements

Over the past decade, some groups have reported that nanofluids, which are liquids containing suspensions of nanoparticles, have substantially higher thermal conductivity than that of the base fluids. However, the reported high thermal conductivity sometimes cannot be reproduced. Theoretically, potential mechanisms leading to this enhancement are still under scrutiny. In this thesis, we present experimental studies aiming at understanding heat conduction mechanisms in nanofluids. We use graphite flakes as additives and developed methods to prepare stable graphite suspensions. The thermal conductivity enhancement of our suspensions achieved record high thermal conductivity values in different base fluids including water, engine oil, and ethylene glycol. This thesis investigates the effect of graphite flake preparation methods such as microwave and ultrasonic on the thermal conductivity of the suspensions, and found that graphite flakes of tens of nanometer in thickness but tens of microns in size lead to higher thermal conductivity values. To better understand the transport mechanisms, the electrical properties of graphite suspensions are also investigated using AC impedance spectroscopy. The AC impedance spectroscopy leads to insights on how the internal structures of the flake clusters affect heat conduction. Based on the experimental studies, we conclude that the thermal conductivity enhancement in these suspensions is due to percolation heat conduction along graphite flakes. Thesis Supervisor: Gang Chen Title: Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering
Contributing to the Prediction of Coastal Flooding: Simulating Wave Heights and Directions along the Coast of Barrow, Alaska

The community of Barrow, Alaska, Alaska has experienced coastal flooding during extreme weather events throughout events in the past 60 years. To improve the predictions of coastal flooding in coastal communities worldwide, models have been used to simulate flooding caused by storm surges. In many cases the coastal flood heights simulated by these coastal flooding models have been less than the flood heights that have been observed by the affected communities. The hypothesis for this project is that the results from coastal flooding models would be closer to observations if the contributions of waves to local sea level rise were taken into account. The Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) model was used to simulate wave heights and directions offshore and in the Barrow coastal vicinity. Wind conditions from 11 historical storms and a recent storm (July 2003) were used as input data for SWAN. The wave simulations for the 11 historical storms showed wave development as a response to a constant wind speed and direction. The wave simulations for the July 2003 storm showed wave development as a response to the average wind speeds and directions every 6 hours. The output data for all the wave simulations consisted of wave height and direction distributions offshore and in the Barrow coastal vicinity. The resulting wave height data compared quite [I would cut out the word "quite" for the same reason we were talking about this morning about words like really and very and science papers. ] well to community recollections of the coastal wave heights. In a future application, these wave heights will be incorporated into coastal flooding models to test the contribution of waves to coastal flooding in Barrow. This work was done under the auspices of the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS®) program of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. SOARS® 2003, Casey Thornbrugh, 1
Towards Wi-Fi AP-Assisted Content Prefetching for On-Demand TV Series: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

The emergence of smart Wi-Fi APs (Access Point), which are equipped with huge storage space, opens a new research area on how to utilize these resources at the edge network to improve users' quality of experience (QoE) (e.g., a short startup delay and smooth playback). One important research interest in this area is content prefetching, which predicts and accurately fetches contents ahead of users' requests to shift the traffic away during peak periods. However, in practice, the different video watching patterns among users, and the varying network connection status lead to the time-varying server load, which eventually makes the content prefetching problem challenging. To understand this challenge, this paper first performs a large-scale measurement study on users' AP connection and TV series watching patterns using real-traces. Then, based on the obtained insights, we formulate the content prefetching problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The objective is to strike a balance between the increased prefetching&storage cost incurred by incorrect prediction and the reduced content download delay because of successful prediction. A learning-based approach is proposed to solve this problem and another three algorithms are adopted as baselines. In particular, first, we investigate the performance lower bound by using a random algorithm, and the upper bound by using an ideal offline approach. Then, we present a heuristic algorithm as another baseline. Finally, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm that is more practical to work in the online manner. Through extensive trace-based experiments, we demonstrate the performance gain of our design. Remarkably, our learning-based algorithm achieves a better precision and hit ratio (e.g., 80%) with about 70% (resp. 50%) cost saving compared to the random (resp. heuristic) algorithm.
A Novel Game Based Incentive Strategy for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are a emerging networks characterized by frequent network partitions, high bit error ratio and random topology instability, where the message propagation depends on the cooperation of nodes to fulfill a "store-carry-forward" fashion. Due to the constrained energy, memory and processing capacity, some individual nodes may behave selfishly, or even maliciously, which will introduce damage into the existing routing schemes based on cooperation and degrade the performance (lower delivery ratio, longer latency etc.,) of opportunistic networks greatly. In order to address the above issues, the current price-based incentive strategy, Credit relies on a fixed management-center which is rare in the realistic opportunistic networks with little infrastructure to manage the transaction that the source of messages pays virtual credits to nodes that relay messages for it. So this paper proposes a novel Game based Incentive Strategy (GIS) which utilizes three-time bargaining model based on two-person transaction and allows the sending nodes to pay the relay nodes directly according to the optimal price drawn by game without any third party. GIS stimulates the cooperation of selfish nodes to forward messages effectively, while holds back the deceptive price stemmed from the malicious intermediary nodes to facilitate deals. From the extensive simulations results, GIS can optimize the average latency and the delivery ratio to the greatest extent. Additionally, effectiveness and fairness can be guaranteed.
Statistical Theory of Elastic Constants of Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

A statistical theory of cholesteric liquid crystals composed of short rigid biaxial molecules is presented. It is derived in the thermodynamic limit at a small density and a small twist. The uniaxial (biaxial) cholesteric phase is regarded as a distorted form of the uniaxial (biaxial) nematic phase. The chirality of the interactions and the implementation of the inversion to the rotation matrix elements are discussed in detail. General microscopic expressions for the elastic constants are derived. The expressions involve the one-particle distribution function and the potential energy of two-body short-range interactions. It is shown that the elastic constants determine the twist of the phase. The stability condition for the cholesteric and nematic phases is presented. The theory is used to study unary and binary systems. The temperature and concentration dependence of the order parameters, the elastic constants and the twist of the phase are obtained. The possibility of phase separation is not investigated.
An adaptive multi-objective clonal selection algorithm

It is difficult for traditional search methods to solve multi-objective optimization problems. Based on the idea of clonal selection principle, we present an adaptive multi-objective clonal selection algorithm (AMCSA) for function optimization problems and analyze its powerful performance from the immune system point of view. The main feature of the algorithm is the global search performance and the solution sets produced are highly competitive in terms of convergence, diversity and distribution. The comparative simulation results show that the proposed algorithm not only can obtain a set of solutions including the global optimum and multiple local optima, but also has much less computational cost than other algorithms.
Associations of VEGF and its receptors sVEGFR-1 and -2 with cardiovascular disease and survival in prevalent haemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) was recently shown to predict survival in prevalent haemodialysis patients. Soluble VEGF receptors (sVEGFR)-1 and -2 are circulating endogenous modulators of VEGF activity. We thus studied the relationship between sVEGFR-1 and -2 and survival in a cohort of prevalent haemodialysis (HD) patients. METHODS Components of the VEGF system were measured (ELISAs) in 185 prevalent HD patients and levels related to clinical characteristics, biochemical markers and survival. The patients were followed up prospectively for a median 31 (20-37) months. RESULTS While ischaemic heart disease was independently associated with a lower sVEGFR-2 (OR = 2.75, P = 0.02), sVEGFR-1 was positively associated with IL-6 (rho = 0.22, P = 0.003) and white blood cell count (rho = 0.22, P = 0.002). In survival analysis, the patients with a high sVEGFR-1 level had a higher all-cause mortality (Kaplan-Meier Chi-Square = 5.6, P = 0.02) and a higher adjusted mortality risk (Cox HR = 1.93, P = 0.009) than those with low levels. CONCLUSION In the first clinical study of sVEGFR-1 and -2 in CKD, we found novel associations between the sVEGFRs and cardiac disease. This may be of clinical importance, as a high sVEGFR-1 was an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality.
The handling of xenon-133 in clinical studies.

133Xe is rapidly becoming one of the more popular agents for functional studies of the lung. As a gas poorly soluble in saline xenon presents unusual laboratory problems. We have shown that the efficiency of extraction for gas volumes greater than 1 cc can be increased significantly by cooling the saline and the dose bottle prior to use. Leakage of 133Xe from multi-injection dose bottles was found to be 5-6% per day even before use. This leakage could be reduced by 70-80% by cooling and inverting the dose bottle. Plastic syringes containing xenon solution leak approximately ½-1% per hour. The xenon was also found to extract from solution and enter into, and collect in, the plastic of the barrel and the rubber plunger as a function of time; for a 2.5 cc syringe containing 0.5 cc of xenon solution, l0% left the solution in 5 minutes and as much as 50% in 2 hours.
Mutations in the glucocerebrosidase gene and Parkinson's disease in Ashkenazi Jews.

BACKGROUND A clinical association has been reported between type 1 Gaucher's disease, which is caused by a glucocerebrosidase deficiency owing to mutations in the glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA), and parkinsonism. We examined whether mutations in the GBA gene are relevant to idiopathic Parkinson's disease. METHODS A clinic-based case series of 99 Ashkenazi patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease, 74 Ashkenazi patients with Alzheimer's disease, and 1543 healthy Ashkenazi Jews who underwent testing to identify heterozygosity for certain recessive diseases were screened for the six GBA mutations (N370S, L444P, 84GG, IVS+1, V394L, and R496H) that are most common among Ashkenazi Jews. RESULTS Thirty-one patients with Parkinson's disease (31.3 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, 22.2 to 40.4 percent) had one or two mutant GBA alleles: 23 were heterozygous for N370S, 4 were heterozygous for 84GG, 3 were homozygous for N370S, and 1 was heterozygous for R496H. Among the 74 patients with Alzheimer's disease, 3 were identified as carriers of Gaucher's disease (4.1 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.0 to 8.5 percent): 2 were heterozygous for N370S, and 1 was heterozygous for 84GG. Ninety-five carriers of Gaucher's disease were identified among the 1543 control subjects (6.2 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, 5.0 to 7.4 percent): 92 were heterozygous for N370S, and 3 were heterozygous for 84GG. Patients with Parkinson's disease had significantly greater odds of being carriers of Gaucher's disease than did patients with Alzheimer's disease (odds ratio, 10.8; 95 percent confidence interval, 3.0 to 46.6; P<0.001) or control subjects (odds ratio, 7.0; 95 percent confidence interval, 4.2 to 11.4; P<0.001). Among the patients with Parkinson's disease, patients who were carriers of Gaucher's disease were younger than those who were not carriers (mean [+/-SD] age at onset, 60.0+/-14.2 years vs. 64.2+/-11.7 years; P=0.04). CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that heterozygosity for a GBA mutation may predispose Ashkenazi Jews to Parkinson's disease.
New Concept for Discriminator Design: From Classifier to Discriminator

This paper introduces a new concept of designing a discriminant analysis method (discriminator), which starts from a local mean based nearest neighbor (LM-NN) classifier and uses its decision rule to direct the design of a discriminator. The derived discriminator, called local mean based nearest neighbor discriminator (LM-NND), matches the LM-NN classifier optimally in theory. The proposed LM-NND method is evaluated using the CENPARMI handwritten numeral database, the ETH80 object category database and the PolyU Palmprint database. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LM-NND and the LM-NN classifier based pattern recognition system.
Magnetic resonance imaging in children with neonatal asphyxia: correlation with developmental sequelae

Magnetic resonance (MR) findings and developmental sequelae were examined in 60 patients with neonatal asphyxia. Nine patients with marked destruction of the cerebrum had the severest motor and mental disability. Six had lesions of the periventricular white matter and thalamus. Seven had border zone infarction with lesions of the white matter and thalamus. Nine had lesions of the middle‐lateral part of the thalamus, putamen and peri‐Rolandic area. Five with lesions of the thalamus, putamen and cerebral white matter had the severest motor and mental disability. Twenty with lesions of the thalamus and/or putamen had athetosis or clumsiness. Four with lesions of the opercular region, white matter and thalamus had feeding difficulty. Some correlation between MR findings and developmental sequelae was recognized.
The stream virtual machine

Stream programming is currently being pushed as a way to expose concurrency and separate communication from computation. Since there are many stream languages and potential stream execution engines, we propose an abstract machine model that captures the essential characteristics of stream architectures, the stream virtual machine (SVM). The goal of the SVM is to improve interoperability, allow development of common compilation tools and reason about stream program performance. The SVM contains control processors, slave kernel processors, and slave DMA units. The compilation process takes a stream program down to the SVM and finally down to machine binary. To extract the parameters for our SVM model, we use micro-kernels to characterize two graphics processors and a stream engine, Imagine. The results are encouraging; the model estimates the performance of the target machines with high accuracy.
Measuring the performance and energy consumption of AES in wireless sensor networks

With WSN deployments increasing in popularity, securing those deployments becomes a necessity. This can be achieved by encrypting inter-node communications and/or using message authentication codes. AES is a well studied symmetric cipher, with no known practical vulnerabilities, that can be used to solve both problems. We provide an optimized implementation of AES, with four modes of operation (ECB, CBC, CFB and CTR), that uses the hardware accelerator available on the ATmega128RFA1 microcontroller, and compare it with the best known software implementation. We show that our hardware AES implementation is both faster and more energy efficient than a software implementation. This is not the case for previous sensor nodes and implementations, which show an improved execution speed, but with a higher energy consumption.
Echinostoma ilocanum Infection in Oddar Meanchey Province, Cambodia

Fecal examinations using the Kato Katz technique were performed on a total of 1,287 villagers (945 students and 342 general inhabitants) of Oddar Meanchey Province, Cambodia in May 2007 and November 2009. The overall intestinal helminth egg positive rate was 23.9%, and the most prevalent helminth species was hookworms (21.6%). Other helminth eggs detected included echinostomes (1.0%), Enterobius vermicularis (0.8%), small trematode eggs (0.7%), which may include Opisthorchis viverrini and Haplorchis spp. , and Hymenolepis nana (0.4%). In order to recover adult echinostomes, we treated 2 patients with 10-15 mg/kg praziquantel and purged. Total 14 adult echinostomes, 1 and 13 worms from each patient, were collected. The echinostomes characteristically had 49-51 collar spines and 2 round or slightly lobated testes. They were identified as Echinostoma ilocanum (Garrison, 1908) Odhner, 1911. So far as literature are concerned, this is the first record on the discovery of human E. ilocanum infection in Cambodia.
Characterizing Internet Video for Large-scale Active Measurements

The availability of high definition video content on the web has brought about a significant change in the characteristics of Internet video, but not many studies on characterizing video have been done after this change. Video characteristics such as video length, format, target bit rate, and resolution provide valuable input to design Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) algorithms, sizing playout buffers in Dynamic Adaptive HTTP streaming (DASH) players, model the variability in video frame sizes, etc. This paper presents datasets collected in 2013 and 2014 that contains over 130,000 videos from YouTube's most viewed (or most popular) video charts in 58 countries. We describe the basic characteristics of the videos on YouTube for each category, format, video length, file size, and data rate variation, observing that video length and file size fit a log normal distribution. We show that three minutes of a video suffice to represent its instant data rate fluctuation and that we can infer data rate characteristics of different video resolutions from a single given one. Based on our findings, we design active measurements for measuring the performance of Internet video.
Regulated ADAM17-dependent EGF family ligand release by substrate-selecting signaling pathways

Ectodomain cleavage of cell-surface proteins by A disintegrin and metalloproteinases (ADAMs) is highly regulated, and its dysregulation has been linked to many diseases. ADAM10 and ADAM17 cleave most disease-relevant substrates. Broad-spectrum metalloprotease inhibitors have failed clinically, and targeting the cleavage of a specific substrate has remained impossible. It is therefore necessary to identify signaling intermediates that determine substrate specificity of cleavage. We show here that phorbol ester or angiotensin II-induced proteolytic release of EGF family members may not require a significant increase in ADAM17 protease activity. Rather, inducers activate a signaling pathway using PKC-α and the PKC-regulated protein phosphatase 1 inhibitor 14D that is required for ADAM17 cleavage of TGF-α, heparin-binding EGF, and amphiregulin. A second pathway involving PKC-δ is required for neuregulin (NRG) cleavage, and, indeed, PKC-δ phosphorylation of serine 286 in the NRG cytosolic domain is essential for induced NRG cleavage. Thus, signaling-mediated substrate selection is clearly distinct from regulation of enzyme activity, an important mechanism that offers itself for application in disease.