Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Lipid Peroxidation Product, 4‐Hydroxy‐2‐trans‐Nonenal, Alters the Conformation of Cortical Synaptosomal Membrane Proteins

Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is widely held to be a disorder associated with oxidative stress due, in part, to the membrane action of amyloid β‐peptide (Aβ). Aβ‐associated free radicals cause lipid peroxidation, a major product of which is 4‐hydroxy‐2‐trans‐nonenal (HNE). We determined whether HNE would alter the conformation of synaptosomal membrane proteins, which might be related to the known neurotoxicity of Aβ and HNE. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, using a protein‐specific spin label, MAL‐6(2,2,6,6‐tetramethyl‐4‐maleimidopiperidin‐1‐oxyl), was used to probe conformational changes in gerbil cortical synaptosomal membrane proteins, and a lipid‐specific stearic acid label, 5‐nitroxide stearate, was used to probe for HNE‐induced alterations in the fluidity of the bilayer domain of these membranes. Synaptosomal membranes, incubated with low concentrations of HNE, exhibited changes in protein conformation and bilayer order and motion (fluidity). The changes in protein conformation were found to be concentration‐ and time‐dependent. Significant protein conformational changes were observed at physiologically relevant concentrations of 1–10 µM HNE, reminiscent of similar changes in synaptosomal membrane proteins from senile plaque‐ and Aβ‐rich AD hippocampal and inferior parietal brain regions. HNE‐induced modifications in the physical state of gerbil synaptosomal membrane proteins were prevented completely by using excess glutathione ethyl ester, known to protect neurons from HNE‐caused neurotoxicity. Membrane fluidity was found to increase at higher concentrations of HNE (50 µM). The results obtained are discussed with relevance to the hypothesis of Aβ‐induced free radical‐mediated lipid peroxidation, leading to subsequent HNE‐induced alterations in the structure and function of key membrane proteins with consequent neurotoxicity in AD brain.
A Wavelet-based Image Codec for Interactive Network Applications

Multimedia network systems require image and video compression schemes in order to efficiently take profit from the available bandwidth. In this paper, we present a wavelet still-image coder, called LTW (Lower-Tree Wavelet), based on the construction and codification of coefficient trees as other proposals do. This algorithm is fast and symmetric (except in extremely low bit rates), which makes it adequate for real-time interactive multimedia applications. We have compared our algorithm with several well-known coders in terms of rate/distortion performance using the standard Lena image. Results show that LTW, with lower temporal complexity, achieves better results than EZW (0.9 dB PSNR) and stack-run (0.25 dB). Also, we have tested the temporal complexity of LTW algorithm, resulting 3.5 times faster than an optimized EZW. On the other hand, compared to DCT-based standards, like JPEG, our algorithm outperforms them in 5 dB approx. (at similar bit rates)
Cloth simulation and collision detection using geometry images

The simulation and animation of cloth has attracted considerable research interest by the computer graphics community. Cloth that behaves realistically is already expected in animated films, and real-time applications are certain to follow. A common challenge faced when simulating the complex behaviour of cloth, especially at interactive frame rates, is maintaining an acceptable level of realism while keeping computation time to a minimum. A common method of increasing the efficiency is a decrease in the number of nodes controlling the cloth movement, sacrificing details that could only be obtained using a dense discretization of the cloth. A simple and efficient method to simulate cloth is the mass-spring system which utilises a regular grid of vertices, representing discrete points along the cloth's surface. The structure of geometry images is similar, which makes them an ideal choice for representing arbitrary surface meshes in a cloth simulator whilst retaining the efficiency of a mass-spring system. In this paper we present a novel method to apply geometry images to cloth simulation in order to obtain cloth motion for surface meshes of arbitrary genus, while retaining the simplicity of a mass-spring model. We also adapt an implicit/explicit integration scheme, utilising the regular structure of geometry images, to improve performance. Additionally, the cloth is able to drape over other objects, also represented as geometry images. Our method is efficient enough to allow for fairly dense cloth meshes to be simulated in real-time.
Low bitrate image compression using self-organized Kohonen maps

In this paper, we propose a new image compression algorithm based on Kohonen self-organized maps. The compression is based on vector quantization (VQ) of the DCT coefficients of image blocks, where the VQ is implemented by a Kohonen network. At low bitrates, our proposed method performs better than an earlier compression scheme developed by Amerijckx et al. (1998) and shows better subjective results in comparison to JPEG.
Is STEM running out of steam for Asian Americans? College admissions officers' perceptions of applicants

While many people view Asian Americans as ‘model minorities’ who excel in math, science and music, they are also negatively stereotyped as nerdy and unsociable. Research has shown that Asian Americans have to outperform other races academically to receive equal consideration by colleges. This study is the first to test whether this bias is directed towards all Asian Americans or only those who fit the model minority stereotype. The present experiment investigates the effect of race and stereotypes on perceptions of students in the college admission process. College admission officers (N = 79) were randomly assigned to view a shortened version of a college application. The participants rated the student whose application they saw according to likelihood of being accepted into college, social competence, academic competence and contribution to a college's diversity. The stereotypical Asian American student was perceived to be significantly less likely to be accepted into college and had a lower perceived social competence than the other three students. Additionally, students who participated in counter-stereotypical Asian activities were perceived as being more likely to be accepted, more socially competent and to contribute more diversity than students who participated in stereotypical Asian activities. A multiple regression revealed that social competence was the only significant predictor of likely acceptance. This study suggests that rather than all Asian American students being disadvantaged in the college admissions process, it is only those who fit common stereotypes who are affected.
Bagged Boosted Trees for Classification of Ecological Momentary Assessment Data

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data is organized in multiple levels (per-subject, per-day, etc.) and this particular structure should be taken into account in machine learning algorithms used in EMA like decision trees and its variants. We propose a new algorithm called BBT (standing for Bagged Boosted Trees) that is enhanced by a over/under sampling method and can provide better estimates for the conditional class probability function. Experimental results on a real-world dataset show that BBT can benefit EMA data classification and performance.
The Differential Roles of LFA-1 and Mac-1 in Host Defense Against Systemic Infection with Streptococcus pneumoniae1

Mice deficient in CD18, which lack all four CD11 integrins, have leukocytosis and increased susceptibility to bacterial infection. To determine the effect of deficiencies in LFA-1 (CD11a/CD18) or Mac-1 (CD11b/CD18) on host defense against systemic bacterial infection, knockout mice were inoculated i.p. with Streptococcus pneumoniae. Increased mortality occurred in both LFA-1−/− (15 of 17 vs 13 of 35 in wild type (WT), p < 0.01) and Mac-1−/− (17 of 34 vs 6 of 25, p < 0.01) mice. All deaths in LFA-1−/− mice occurred after 72 h, whereas most deaths in Mac-1−/− mice occurred within 24–48 h. At 24 h, 21 of 27 Mac-1−/− mice were bacteremic, vs 15 of 25 WT (p = 0.05); no difference was observed between LFA-1−/− and WT. Increased bacteria were recovered from Mac-1−/− spleens at 2 h (p = 0.03) and 6 h (p = 0.002) and from livers (p = 0.001) by 6 h. No difference was observed at 2 h in LFA-1−/− mice, but by 6 h increased bacteria were recovered from spleens (p = 0.008) and livers (p = 0.04). Baseline and peak leukocyte counts were similar between Mac-1−/− and WT, but elevated in LFA-1−/−. At 8 h, peritoneal neutrophils were increased in Mac-1−/−, but not significantly different in LFA-1−/−. Histopathologically, at 24 h Mac-1−/− animals had bacteremia and lymphoid depletion, consistent with sepsis. LFA-1−/− mice had increased incidence of otitis media and meningitis/encephalitis vs WT at 72 and 96 h. Both Mac-1 and LFA-1 play important but distinct roles in host defense to S. pneumoniae.
A common evolutionary origin for the ON- and OFF-edge motion detection pathways of the Drosophila visual system

Synaptic circuits for identified behaviors in the Drosophila brain have typically been considered from either a developmental or functional perspective without reference to how the circuits might have been inherited from ancestral forms. For example, two candidate pathways for ON- and OFF-edge motion detection in the visual system act via circuits that use respectively either T4 or T5, two cell types of the fourth neuropil, or lobula plate (LOP), that exhibit narrow-field direction-selective responses and provide input to wide-field tangential neurons. T4 or T5 both have four subtypes that terminate one each in the four strata of the LOP. Representatives are reported in a wide range of Diptera, and both cell types exhibit various similarities in: (1) the morphology of their dendritic arbors; (2) their four morphological and functional subtypes; (3) their cholinergic profile in Drosophila; (4) their input from the pathways of L3 cells in the first neuropil, or lamina (LA), and by one of a pair of LA cells, L1 (to the T4 pathway) and L2 (to the T5 pathway); and (5) their innervation by a single, wide-field contralateral tangential neuron from the central brain. Progenitors of both also express the gene atonal early in their proliferation from the inner anlage of the developing optic lobe, being alone among many other cell type progeny to do so. Yet T4 receives input in the second neuropil, or medulla (ME), and T5 in the third neuropil or lobula (LO). Here we suggest that these two cell types were originally one, that their ancestral cell population duplicated and split to innervate separate ME and LO neuropils, and that a fiber crossing—the internal chiasma—arose between the two neuropils. The split most plausibly occurred, we suggest, with the formation of the LO as a new neuropil that formed when it separated from its ancestral neuropil to leave the ME, suggesting additionally that ME input neurons to T4 and T5 may also have had a common origin.
Does Schooling Cause Growth

A number of economists find that growth and schooling are highly correlated across countries. A model is examined in which the ability to build on the human capital of one's elders plays an important role in linking growth to schooling. The model is calibrated to quantify the strength of the effect of schooling on growth by using evidence from the labor literature on Mincerian returns to education. The upshot is that the impact of schooling on growth explains less than one-third of the empirical cross-country relationship. The ability of reverse causality to explain this empirical relationship is also investigated.
PALMINI-Fast Boolean Minimizer for Personal Computer

This paper describes a fast and efficient method for minimization of two level single output Boolean functions. The minimization problem is reduced to that of coloring of the graph of incompatibility of implicants. The program permits also to remove static hazards and allows inversion of output's polarity which proves to be very convenient when designing with PAL's. It gives solutions within a very reasonable amount of time. On small industrial examples its speed is slightly better than Espresso and it occupies 6 times less memory.
Genetic Diversity of Circulating Rotavirus Strains in Tanzania Prior to the Introduction of Vaccination

Background Tanzania currently rolls out vaccination against rotavirus-diarrhea, a major cause of child illness and death. As the vaccine covers a limited number of rotavirus variants, this study describes the molecular epidemiology of rotavirus among children under two years in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, prior to implementation of vaccination. Methods Stool specimens, demographic and clinical information, were collected from 690 children admitted to hospital due to diarrhea (cases) and 545 children without diarrhea (controls) during one year. Controls were inpatient or children attending child health clinics. Rotavirus antigen was detected using ELISA and positive samples were typed by multiplex semi-nested PCR and sequencing. Results The prevalence of rotavirus was higher in cases (32.5%) than in controls (7.7%, P<0.001). The most common G genotypes were G1 followed by G8, G12, and G4 in cases and G1, G12 and G8 in controls. The Tanzanian G1 variants displayed 94% similarity with the Rotarix vaccine G1 variant. The commonest P genotypes were P[8], P[4] and P[6], and the commonest G/P combination G1 P[8] (n = 123), G8 P[4] and G12 P[6]. Overall, rotavirus prevalence was higher in cool (23.9%) than hot months (17.1%) of the year (P = 0.012). We also observed significant seasonal variation of G genotypes. Rotavirus was most frequently found in the age group of four to six months. The prevalence of rotavirus in cases was lower in stunted children (28.9%) than in non-stunted children (40.1%, P = 0.003) and lower in HIV-infected (15.4%, 4/26) than in HIV-uninfected children (55.3%, 42/76, P<0.001). Conclusion This pre-vaccination study shows predominance of genotype G1 in Tanzania, which is phylogenetically distantly related to the vaccine strains. We confirm the emergence of genotype G8 and G12. Rotavirus infection and circulating genotypes showed seasonal variation. This study also suggests that rotavirus may not be an opportunistic pathogen in children infected with HIV.
Power Efficient Relay Networking for BANs in Non-Homogeneous Enviroment

Body Area Networks (BANs) has great potential to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. The wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is one of the promising wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) applications that provides a noninvasive way to inspect the entire Gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The low operating power of the capsule is the most critical factor to ensure the performance of WCE. In this paper, we investigate the power efficient relay networking in non-homogeneous environment to reduce the transmitting power consumption of WCE which passes through two major digestive organs, small intestine and large intestine, in the human body. According to the deployment of relay sensors, we provide analysis of the maximum and minimum consumed power for the capsule with different relay sensor number and different angle. Simulation results show that when the number of relay sensors on body surface extends to specific numbers (23 for large intestine, 14 for small intestine), the deployment of relay networking has almost no inuence of the power consumption for the capsule. When the number of relay nodes is under some specific number, the angle and number has huge effect on the power consumption. At the same time, we verify the optimal selection and deployment of on-body sensors to minimize the WCE power consumption. Keywords—Body area networks; Power efficient; Relay networking; Non-homogeneous.
Started from the Bottom Now We're Where? African‐American and Latino Niching in Gulf Coast Metros

Objectives Labor market concentration, or niching, is a process by which individuals are concentrated in particular sectors often by racial or ethnic group, gender, or economic standing. Niching limits economic upward mobility for certain groups, particularly African Americans and Latinos, and processes encouraging niching may change over time. Methods This study examines Africanâ€ American and Latino occupational niching in New Orleans and Houston in 2000 and 2008â€“2012 using confidential microdata and in relation to both individual and neighborhood characteristics. Results Individual and local human capital levels are found to play important roles in niching likelihood, in addition to other individual characteristics, such as foreignâ€ born status and neighborhood conditions, specifically local coâ€ racial and coâ€ ethnic population percentages. Conclusions Results overall highlight the importance of placeâ€ and groupâ€ specific approaches to both policy and research related to improving economic outcomes for racial and ethnic groups. These customized efforts are particularly important in metropolitan areas undergoing rapid economic, social, and demographic growth and restructuring such as New Orleans and Houston.
New spectral methods for ratio cut partitioning and clustering

Partitioning of circuit netlists in VLSI design is considered. It is shown that the second smallest eigenvalue of a matrix derived from the netlist gives a provably good approximation of the optimal ratio cut partition cost. It is also demonstrated that fast Lanczos-type methods for the sparse symmetric eigenvalue problem are a robust basis for computing heuristic ratio cuts based on the eigenvector of this second eigenvalue. Effective clustering methods are an immediate by-product of the second eigenvector computation and are very successful on the difficult input classes proposed in the CAD literature. The intersection graph representation of the circuit netlist is considered, as a basis for partitioning, a heuristic based on spectral ratio cut partitioning of the netlist intersection graph is proposed. The partitioning heuristics were tested on industry benchmark suites, and the results were good in terms of both solution quality and runtime. Several types of algorithmic speedups and directions for future work are discussed. >
Assessing Quality of Care and Elder Abuse in Nursing Homes via Google Reviews

Background It is challenging to assess the quality of care and detect elder abuse in nursing homes, since patients may be incapable of reporting quality issues or abuse themselves, and resources for sending inspectors are limited. Objective This study correlates Google reviews of nursing homes with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) inspection results in the Nursing Home Compare (NHC) data set, to quantify the extent to which the reviews reflect the quality of care and the presence of elder abuse. Methods A total of 16,160 reviews were collected, spanning 7,170 nursing homes. Two approaches were tested: using the average rating as an overall estimate of the quality of care at a nursing home, and using the average scores from a maximum entropy classifier trained to recognize indications of elder abuse. Results The classifier achieved an F-measure of 0.81, with precision 0.74 and recall 0.89. The correlation for the classifier is weak but statistically significant: = 0.13, P < . 001, and 95% confidence interval (0.10, 0.16). The correlation for the ratings exhibits a slightly higher correlation: = 0.15, P < . 001. Both the classifier and rating correlations approach approximately 0.65 when the effective average number of reviews per provider is increased by aggregating similar providers. Conclusions These results indicate that an analysis of Google reviews of nursing homes can be used to detect indications of elder abuse with high precision and to assess the quality of care, but only when a sufficient number of reviews are available.
06-01 Naming , Migration , and Replication for NFSv 4

In this paper, we discuss a global name space for NFSv4 and mechanisms for transparent migration and replication. By convention, any file or directory name beginning with /nfs on an NFS client is part of this shared global name space. Our system supports file system migration and replication through DNS resolution, provides directory migration and replication using builtin NFSv4 mechanisms, and supports read/write replication with precise consistency guarantees, small performance penalty, and good scaling. We implement these features with small extensions to the published NFSv4 protocol, and demonstrate a practical way to enhance network transparency and administerability of NFSv4 in wide area networks.
The Association between Internet Addiction and Depression

Internet addiction is a newly emerged disorder having great globalized psychosocial impact. Depressive disorder is one of the most reported comorbidities. To understand the comorbidity of Internet addiction and depressive disorder can shed light on the mechanism of Internet addiction. In this overview, we review the association between Internet addiction and depression. The cross-section study has shown a solid association between Internet addiction and depression. The prospective study has also demonstrated both temporal directions of a causal relationship between the two disorders. Covariance analysis has demonstrated a complex interaction between the two disorders. Here, we propose four candidate models-the escape, the negative consequences, the bi-direction, and the shared mechanisms model-as working candidate models in our temporary attempt to explain the association between those two disorders. While awaiting the validation for those models, we also suggest future directions for studies, and for treating subjects with Internet addiction.
Direct Torque Control for Three-Level Neutral Point Clamped Inverter-Fed Induction Motor Drive

Direct torque control (DTC) is a control technique in AC drive systems to obtain high performance torque control. The classical DTC drive contains a pair of hysteresis comparators and suffers from variable switching frequency and high torque ripple. These problems can be solved by using space vector depending on the reference torque and flux. In this paper the space vector modulation technique is applied to the three-level Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) inverter control in the proposed DTC-based induction motor drive system, resulting to a significant reduce of torque ripple. Three-level neutral point clamped inverters have been widely used in medium voltage applications. This type of inverters have several advantages over standard two-level VSI, such as greater number of levels in the output voltage waveforms, less harmonic distortion in voltage and current waveforms and lower switching frequencies. This paper emphasizes the derivation of switching states using the Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) technique. The control scheme is implemented using Matlab/Simulink. Experimental results using dSPACE validate the steady-state and the dynamic performance of the proposed control strategy.
Visual Query of Multi-Dimensional Temporal Data

In this work we present an integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization for search and discovery of temporal patterns within multi-dimensional data sets. Many have proposed visual query languages for temporal data but fail to address the presentation of the results. Others have designed successful visualizations of temporal data, but do not include support for ad-hoc query of interesting patterns. We couple both stages of temporal query in a single tool for exploration and discovery of temporal patterns. We define temporal patterns as sequences of Events with inter-event TimeSpans. Pattern queries allow for Event and TimeSpan attributes to be constrained in different ways. We formalize the types of pattern queries our system supports according to the levels of restriction imposed upon both Events and TimeSpans.