Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Imprinting, the X-Chromosome, and the Male Brain: Explaining Sex Differences in the Liability to Autism

Males are at least four times more likely to develop autism than females. Among relatives with a broader autistic phenotype, males predominate too. Autism is a highly heritable disorder, yet genome scans have not revealed any predisposing loci on the sex chromosomes. A nongenetic explanation for male vulnerability, such as exposure to prenatal androgens, is unlikely for a variety of reasons. A novel genetic mechanism that resolves many of the outstanding difficulties is outlined here. The imprinted-X liability threshold model hypothesizes that the threshold for phenotypic expression of many autistic characteristics is influenced by an imprinted X-linked gene(s) that is protective in nature. Imprinted genes are known to play an important role in normal fetal and behavioral development. The gene is expressed only on the X-chromosome that is inherited from the father and raises the threshold for phenotypic expression. It is normally silenced when transmitted maternally. Because only females have a paternal X-chromosome, the threshold for phenotypic expression is higher in them than in males. Evidence for the existence of the genetic locus was found in a study of females with X-monosomy (Turner's syndrome) in which females had either a single paternal or maternal X-chromosome. Identifying the sites of action of this X-linked gene could lead to the discovery of autosomal loci that confer more directly a predisposition to autism.
Phototropin is the blue-light receptor that controls multiple steps in the sexual life cycle of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

Blue light as an environmental cue plays a pivotal role in controlling the progression of the sexual life cycle in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Phototropin was considered a prime candidate for the blue-light receptor involved. By using the RNA interference method, knockdown strains with reduced phototropin levels were isolated. Those with severely reduced levels of this photoreceptor were partially impaired in three steps of the life cycle: in gametogenesis, the maintenance of mating ability, and the germination of zygotes. These observations suggest that phototropin is the principal sensory molecule used by this alga for the control of its life cycle by light.
A component framework for direct-manipulation editors

Object-oriented software technology has some significant flaws that are addressed with component technology. The foundations of software component technology and the possible and useful kinds of software composition are still an open issue of ongoing research. After a clarification of important issues of component technology and component composition, we present an object-oriented component framework that was developed to serve as the basis for an adaptable software development environment. The framework supports the construction of applications with a direct-manipulation user interface (especially graphic editors) and a code generation back-end. It uses a trading mechanism for component integration at run time, facilitates the separation of component adaptation and component composition, and incorporates an architecture that supports system evolution to a certain degree.
The emerging role of autophagy in peroxisome dynamics and lipid metabolism of phyllosphere microorganisms

Eukaryotic microorganisms resident in the phyllosphere (above-ground, plant-surface environments) undergo dynamic changes in nutrient conditions and adapt their metabolic pathways during proliferation or in the course of infection of host plants. Some of these metabolic switches are accomplished by regulation of organelle abundance. Recent studies have shown that autophagy plays a major role in reducing the organelle quantity, thereby contributing to the metabolic switch required for survival or virulence of the microorganisms in the phyllosphere. In this mini review the metabolic pathways in several phytopathogenic fungi and the non-infectious asporogenous yeast Candida boidinii, which involve lipid droplets and peroxisomes, are summarized. The physiological functions of Atg (Autophagy-related) proteins in these organisms are discussed in relation to the dynamics of these two important organelles.
The DynAlloy Visualizer

We present an extension to the DynAlloy tool to navigate DynAlloy counterexamples: the DynAlloy Visualizer. The user interface mimics the functionality of a programming language debugger. Without this tool, a DynAlloy user is forced to deal with the internals of the Alloy intermediate representation in order to debug a flaw in her model.
The Importance of Purkinje Activation in Long Duration Ventricular Fibrillation

Background The mechanisms that maintain long duration ventricular fibrillation (LDVF) are unclear. The difference in distribution of the Purkinje system in dogs and pigs was explored to determine if Purkinje activation propagates to stimulate working myocardium (WM) during LDVF and WM pacing. Methods and Results In‐vivo extracellular recordings were made from 1044 intramural plunge and epicardial plaque electrodes in 6 pig and 6 dog hearts. Sinus activation propagated sequentially from the endocardium to the epicardium in dogs but not pigs. During epicardial pacing, activation propagated along the endocardium and traversed the LV wall almost parallel to the epicardium in dogs, but in pigs propagated away from the pacing site approximately perpendicular to the epicardium. After 1 minute of VF, activation rate near the endocardium was significantly faster than near the epicardium in dogs (P<0.01) but not pigs (P>0.05). From 2 to 10 minutes of LDVF, recordings exhibiting Purkinje activations were near the endocardium in dogs (P<0.01) but were scattered transmurally in pigs, and the WM activation rate in recordings in which Purkinje activations were present was significantly faster than the WM activation rate in recordings in which Purkinje activations were absent (P<0.01). In 10 isolated perfused dog hearts, the LV endocardium was exposed and 2 microelectrodes were inserted into Purkinje and adjacent myocardial cells. After 5 minutes of LDVF, mean Purkinje activation rate was significantly faster than mean WM activation rate (P<0.01). Conclusion These extracellular and intracellular findings about activation support the hypothesis that Purkinje activation propagates to stimulate WM during sinus rhythm, pacing, and LDVF.
Discrete cosine transforms on quantum computers

A classical computer does not allow the calculation of a discrete cosine transform on N points in less than linear time. This trivial lower bound is no longer valid for a computer that takes advantage of quantum mechanical superposition, entanglement, and interference principles. In fact, we show that it is possible to realize the discrete cosine transforms and the discrete sine transforms of size N/spl times/N and types I, II, III and IV with as little as O(log/sup 2/N) operations on a quantum computer; whereas the known fast algorithms on a classical computer need O(N logN) operations.
Salivary testosterone measurement by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry in adult males and females

Background Salivary testosterone (Sal-T) may be a useful surrogate of serum free testosterone. The study aims were to use a novel liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) assay to determine whether Sal-T concentrations accurately reflect Sal-T concentrations in both sexes and to investigate practical aspects of sample collection. Methods Saliva and serum samples were collected in 104 male and 91 female subjects. A more sensitive LC-MS/MS assay was developed to enable Sal-T quantitation in the low concentrations found in females. Saliva (200 µL) was extracted with 1 mL of methyl-tert-butyl ether following the addition of D5-testosterone. Quantitation was performed using a Waters TQ-S mass spectrometer. Results The assay achieved a lower limit of quantification of 5 pmol/L, sufficiently sensitive to measure testosterone in female saliva. Sal-T showed a diurnal variation but samples taken at weekly and monthly intervals showed no significant differences. Sal-T was stable at ambient temperature for up to 5 days, after freeze-thawing and 3 years frozen storage. Reference intervals for Sal-T were 93–378 pmol/L in males and 5–46 pmol/L in females. Sal-T correlated significantly with serum calculated free-T in males (r = 0.71, P < 0.001) and in females (r = 0.39, P < 0.001). Conclusions These results confirm that testosterone can be reliably and accurately measured by LC-MS/MS in both adult male and female saliva samples. These results lay the foundation for further exploration of the clinical application of Sal- T as a reliable alternative to serum testosterone in the diagnosis and management of androgen disorders and assessment of androgen status in clinical research.
Preoperative determination of CASA (Cancer Associated Serum Antigen) and CA-125 for the discrimination between benign and malignant pelvic tumor mass: a prospective study.

BACKGROUND CA-125 is the most important tumor marker in epithelial ovarian cancer. Due to its low specificity, a combination with CASA may improve the clinical discrimination between benign and malignant adnexal masses. MATERIALS AND METHODS In a prospective study CA-125 and CASA were analyzed in blood specimens of 153 patients, including 29 ovarian cancer. RESULTS The median levels of both markers were significantly higher in ovarian cancer than in benign diseases. The sensitivity of CA-125 was 90%, while the specificity was 79%. PPV and NPV were 50% and 97%. In comparison, the sensitivity of CASA was lower (38%), while the specificity was slightly higher (86%). PPV and NPV were 39% and 86%. When both markers were used together, the specificity could be increased to 96% but the sensitivity remained at only 38%. The PPV and NPV was 69% and 87%. CONCLUSION The combination of CA-125 and CASA can improve the detection of patients with suspected ovarian cancer.
The Efficacy of Psychophysiological Measures for Implementing Adaptive Technology

Adaptive automation refers to technology that can change its mode of operation dynamically. Further, both the technology and the operator can initiate changes in the level or mode of automation. The present paper reviews research on adaptive technology. It is divided into three primary sections. In the first section, issues surrounding the development and implementation of adaptive automation are presented. Because physiological- based measures show much promise for implementing adaptive automation, the second section is devoted to examining candidate indices. In the final section, those techniques that show the greatest promise for adaptive automation as well as issues that still need to be resolved are discussed.
Online prediction of needle shape deformation in moving soft tissues from visual feedback

With the increasing number of clinical interventions using needle shaped tools, robotic control of needle insertion procedures has been an active research field for many years. In this work we propose a 3D model of a flexible needle that takes into account tissue deformations in order to predict the needle shape and trajectory when it is inserted using a robotic arm. To account for tissue displacements, we designed a method based on visual feedback that updates the interaction model between the needle and the tissue using an unscented Kalman filter. Results obtained from several needle insertions in a soft tissue phantom showed that the method gives good performance in terms of needle trajectory prediction. This model was also considered in a closed-loop control approach to allow automatic reaching of a target.
Intensity discrimination: a severe departure from Weber's law.

These experiments were designed to assess the importance of different types of information which might be used in detecting intensity changes for pure tones. Thresholds for detecting an intensity change, expressed as 10 log (delta I/I), were measured over a wide range of frequencies and levels under conditions where one or more sources of information was either present or was removed. Spread of excitation was restricted by using bandstop noise centered at the signal frequency. Information conveyed by dynamic responses to signal onsets and offsets was eliminated by masking onsets and offsets with bursts of bandpass noise. Phase-locking information was eliminated by using high-frequency signals (above 5 kHz). Dynamic responses to signal onsets and offsets appear to play little role in intensity discrimination. Phase locking does appear to be important since Weber's law or a near-miss to it was observed at low frequencies, whereas at high frequencies performance deteriorated at moderate sound levels, and improved again at high levels. A preliminary experiment, using 225-ms stimuli revealed only a small midlevel deterioration at high frequencies. However, when 30-ms stimuli were used a large deterioration was observed, performance being worse when bandstop noise was presented with the tone. Hence at short durations and high frequencies spread of excitation seems to be important: When it is restricted by bandstop noise values of 10 log (delta I/I) observed at moderate levels it can be as large as 14 dB. The results of the experiments are consistent with a bimodal distribution of thresholds in primary auditory neurons; at intermediate levels neither population will operate effectively. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
From keystrokes to annotated process data: Enriching the output of Inputlog with linguistic information

Keystroke logging tools are a valuable aid to monitor written language production. These tools record all keystrokes, including backspaces and deletions together with timing information. In this paper we report on an extension to the keystroke logging program Inputlog in which we aggregate the logged process data from the keystroke (character) level to the word level. The logged process data are further enriched with different kinds of linguistic information: part-of-speech tags, lemmata, chunk boundaries, syllable boundaries and word frequency. A dedicated parser has been developed that distils from the logged process data word-level revisions, deleted fragments and final product data. The linguistically-annotated output will facilitate the linguistic analysis of the logged data and will provide a valuable basis for more linguistically-oriented writing process research. The set-up of the extension to Inputlog is largely language-independent. As proof-of-concept, the extension has been developed for English and Dutch. Inputlog is freely available for research purposes.
Cross domain sentiment classification using enhanced sentiment sensitive thesaurus (ESST)

Sentiment classification is classification of reviews into positive or negative depends on the sentiment words expressed in reviews. Generally, sentiments are expressed differently in different domain and annotating label for every domain is expensive and time consuming. In cross domain sentiment classification, a classifier trained in source domain is applied to classify reviews of target domain which produce poor performance due to features mismatch between source domain and target domain. The proposed method develops solution to feature mismatch problem in cross domain sentiment classification by creating enhanced sentiment sensitive thesaurus using wiktionary. The enhanced sentiment sensitive thesaurus aligns different words in expressing the same sentiment not only from different domains of reviews and from wiktionary to increase the classification performance in target domain. Next, feature vector augmentation is performed using enhanced sentiment sensitive thesaurus while training a classifier. The proposed method performs a cross domain sentiment classification on a bench mark dataset Amazon product reviews for different types of products.
Visual Strategies for Sparse Spike Coding

We explore visual spike coding strategies in a neural layer in order to build a dynamical model of primary vision. A strictly feed-forward architecture is compared to a strategy accounting for lateral interactions that shows sparse spike coding of the image as is observed in the primary visual areas [1]. This transform is defined over a neural layer according to a greedy matching pursuit scheme and we show that for natural images its coefficients may be simply carried by the rank of spike arrival. This model is easily expandable to multiple layers and despite its simplicity has applications to image compression comparable to industrial standards but also novel strategies for pattern detection.
Composite Variable Formulations for Express Shipment Service Network Design

In this paper we describe a new approach to solving the express shipment service network design problem. Conventional polyhedral methods for network design and network loading problems do not consistently solve instances of the planning problem we consider. Under a restricted version of the problem, we transform conventional formulations to a new formulation using what we termcomposite variables. By removing flow decisions as explicit decisions, this extended formulation is cast purely in terms of the design elements. We establish that its linear programming relaxation gives stronger lower bounds than conventional approaches. We apply this composite variable formulation approach to the UPS Next Day Air delivery network and demonstrate potential annual cost savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
A Novel Dynamic Spectrum Hole Sensing Scheme

A novel dynamic spectrum hole sensing scheme is developed for the chirp signal. A narrow band energy detector combined with frequency scanner is used for achievement of the basic spectrum occupied scene. The Kalman filter predicts the instantaneous frequency and energy of chirp signal. Based on the predict results, the CR user can exploit the spectrum hole of chirp signal and coexist with chirp signal system. Simulation results show that the narrow band energy detection combined with frequency scanner can sense the primary signal scene coarsely which is enough for judgment the subchannel's occupancy. Meanwhile, the Kalman filter can predict the chirp signal's parameter precisely.
From Citation Network to Study Map: A Novel Model to Reorganize Academic Literatures

As the number of academic papers and new technologies soars, it has been increasingly difficult for researchers, especially beginners, to enter a new research field. Researchers often need to study a promising paper in depth to keep up with the forefront of technology. Traditional Query-Oriented study method is time-consuming and even tedious. For a given paper, existent academic search engines like Google Scholar tend to recommend relevant papers, failing to reveal the knowledge structure. The state-of-the-art Map-Oriented study methods such as AMiner and AceMap can structure scholar information, but they're too coarse-grained to dig into the underlying principles of a specific paper. To address this problem, we propose a Study-Map Oriented method and a novel model called RIDP (Reference Injection based Double-Damping PageRank) to help researchers study a given paper more efficiently and thoroughly. RIDP integrates newly designed Reference Injection based Topic Analysis method and Double-Damping PageRank algorithm to mine a Study Map out of massive academic papers in order to guide researchers to dig into the underlying principles of a specific paper. Experiment results on real datasets and pilot user studies indicate that our method can help researchers acquire knowledge more efficiently, and grasp knowledge structure systematically.
Implicit Generation of Pattern-Avoiding Permutations Based on π DDs

Pattern-avoiding permutations are permutations where none of the subsequences match the relative order of a given pattern. Pattern-avoiding permutations are related to practical and abstract mathematical problems and can provide simple representations for such problems. For example, some floorplans, which are used for optimizing very-large-scale integration(VLSI) circuit design, can be encoded into pattern-avoiding permutations. The generation of pattern-avoiding permutations is an important topic in efficient VLSI design and mathematical analysis of patten-avoiding permutations. In this paper, we present an algorithm for generating pattern-avoiding permutations, and extend this algorithm beyond classical patterns to generalized patterns with more restrictions. Our approach is based on the data structure πDDs, which can represent a permutation set compactly and has useful set operations. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by computational experiments.
What is Happening to Earnings Inequality and Youth Wages in the 1990 s ? by Garnett Picot

The increase in earnings inequality among men in particular in Canada has been well documented. This paper adds to our knowledge of inequality trends by addressing three issues. First, what has happened to earnings inequality among the employed population in the 1990s? We find that earnings inequality and polarization increased little in the population of all workers (men and women combined) between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. The second question relates to the impact of the changing propensity of Canadians to hold a job on earnings inequality. Put another way, if we focus on the entire population of working age Canadians (those with and without paid employment), what are the inequality trends. We find that earnings inequality among the working age population changed little over the 1980s and 1990s. This analysis incorporates both the influence of the changing employment/population ratio and inequality trends among employed workers on overall earnings inequality among the working age population. But this relative stability in overall earnings inequality since the mid-1980s masks a number of offsetting underlying trends. Some groups of workers are making earnings gains (notably older workers, and women) while others are losing (notably younger workers and men). This paper focuses in particular on the earnings trends among younger workers, and finds that the decline in annual earnings of younger male workers in particular is associated with a decline in real hourly wages.