Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TASK-3, a Novel Tandem Pore Domain Acid-sensitive K+Channel

Tandem pore domain acid-sensitive K+ channel 3 (TASK-3) is a new member of the tandem pore domain potassium channel family. A cDNA encoding a 365- amino acid polypeptide with four putative transmembrane segments and two pore regions was isolated from guinea pig brain. An orthologous sequence was cloned from a human genomic library. Although TASK-3 is 62% identical to TASK-1, the cytosolic C-terminal sequence is only weakly conserved. Analysis of the gene structure identified an intron within the conserved GYG motif of the first pore region. Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction analysis showed strong expression in brain but very weak mRNA levels in other tissues. Cell-attached patch-clamp recordings of TASK-3 expressed in HEK293 cells showed that the single channel current-voltage relation was inwardly rectifying, and open probability increased markedly with depolarization. Removal of external divalent cations increased the mean single channel current measured at −100 mV from −2.3 to −5.8 pA. Expression of TASK-3 in Xenopus oocytes revealed an outwardly rectifying K+ current that was strongly decreased in the presence of lower extracellular pH. Substitution of the histidine residue His-98 by asparagine or tyrosine abolished pH sensitivity. This histidine, which is located at the outer part of the pore adjacent to the selectivity filter, may be an essential component of the extracellular pH sensor.
Bioengineering and Biotechnology Perspective Article Cofactor Engineering for Enhancing the Flux of Metabolic Pathways

The manufacture of a diverse array of chemicals is now possible with biologically engineered strains, an approach that is greatly facilitated by the emergence of synthetic biology. This is principally achieved through pathway engineering in which enzyme activities are coordinated within a genetically amenable host to generate the product of interest. A great deal of attention is typically given to the quantitative levels of the enzymes with little regard to their overall qualitative states. This highly constrained approach fails to consider other factors that may be necessary for enzyme functionality. In particular, enzymes with physically bound cofactors, otherwise known as holoenzymes, require careful evaluation. Herein, we discuss the importance of cofactors for biocatalytic processes and show with empirical examples why the synthesis and integration of cofactors for the formation of holoenzymes warrant a great deal of attention within the context of pathway engineering.
Towards realistic benchmarking for cloud file systems: Early experiences

Over the past few years, cloud file systems such as Google File System (GFS) and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) have received a lot of research efforts to optimize their designs and implementations. A common issue for these efforts is performance benchmarking. Unfortunately, many system researchers and engineers face challenges on making a benchmark that reflects real-life workload cases, due to the complexity of cloud file systems and vagueness of I/O workload characteristics. They could easily make incorrect assumptions about their systems and workloads, leading to the benchmark results differing from the fact. As the preliminary step for designing a realistic benchmark, we make an effort to explore the characteristics of data and I/O workload in a production environment. We collected a two-week I/O workload trace from a 2,500-node production cluster, which is one of the largest cloud platforms in Asia. This cloud platform provides two public cloud services: data storage service (DSS) and data processing service (DPS). We analyze the commonalities and individualities between both cloud services in multiple perspectives, including the request arrival pattern, request size, data population and so on. Eight key observations are highlighted from the comprehensive study, including the arrival rate of requests follows a Lognormal distribution rather than a Poisson distribution, request arrival presents multiple periodicities, cloud file systems fit partly-open model rather than purely open model or closed model. Based on the comparative analysis results, we derive several interesting implications on guiding system researchers and engineers to build a realistic benchmark on their own systems. Finally, we discuss several open issues and challenges raised on benchmarking cloud file systems.
High performance anthropomorphic robot hand with grasp force magnification mechanism

This paper presents a lightweight 328 g anthropomorphic robot hand that can exert a large grasp force. We propose a combination mechanism of a flexion-drive and a force-magnification-drive for a cable driven multifingered robot hand. The flexion-drive consisting of a feed screw enables quick motion of its fingers and the force-magnification-drive consisting of an eccentric cam, a bearing and a pulley enables a firm grasp. This paper also proposes a three-dimensional linkage for the thumb. This linkage consists of four links and is driven by a feed screw. It can oppose to a large force exerted by the other fingers with the force-magnification-drive. These mechanisms are compact enough to be installed in the developed lightweight hand. We experimentally verify that the maximum fingertip force of the hand exceeds 20 N and that the thumb can hold a large force of 100 N. The time to fully close the hand by using the flexion-drives is 0.47 s. After the fingers make contact with an object, the time to achieve a firm grasp by using the grasp-magnification-drive is approximately 1 s.
PANTHER: a browsable database of gene products organized by biological function, using curated protein family and subfamily classification

The PANTHER database was designed for high-throughput analysis of protein sequences. One of the key features is a simplified ontology of protein function, which allows browsing of the database by biological functions. Biologist curators have associated the ontology terms with groups of protein sequences rather than individual sequences. Statistical models (Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs) are built from each of these groups. The advantage of this approach is that new sequences can be automatically classified as they become available. To ensure accurate functional classification, HMMs are constructed not only for families, but also for functionally distinct subfamilies. Multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees, including curator-assigned information, are available for each family. The current version of the PANTHER database includes training sequences from all organisms in the GenBank non-redundant protein database, and the HMMs have been used to classify gene products across the entire genomes of human, and Drosophila melanogaster. The ontology terms and protein families and subfamilies, as well as Drosophila gene c;assifications, can be browsed and searched for free. Due to outstanding contractual obligations, access to human gene classifications and to protein family trees and multiple sequence alignments will temporarily require a nominal registration fee. PANTHER is publicly available on the web at http://panther.celera. com.
3D gesture-based exploration and search in document collections

This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large document collections. The goal was to provide the user with a highly dynamic environment in which even the very mapping strategy to position documents in space can be adjusted by the user depending on the specific task at hand, on his preferences, or on the context. A modification to the FDP algorithm is proposed, as well as a new gesture-based interaction paradigm in which the user can explore and search information in the collection just by simple hand movements. An experimental user evaluation was carried on to investigate the impact of the proposed approach on the precision of the mental model built by users through exploration, on the effectiveness in information search tasks, and on the general user satisfaction and perception of utility.
Dynamically scheduling VLIW instructions with dependency information

The paper proposes balancing scheduling effort more evenly between the compiler and the processor, by introducing dynamically scheduled Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) instructions. Dynamically Instruction Scheduled VLIW (DISVLIW) processor is aimed specifically at dynamic scheduling VLIW instructions with dependency information. The DISVLIW processor dynamically schedules each instruction within long instructions using functional unit and dynamic scheduler pairs. Every dynamic scheduler dynamically checks for data dependencies and resource collisions while scheduling each instruction. This scheduling is especially effective in applications containing loops. We simulate the architecture and show that the DISVLIW processor performs significantly better than the VLIW processor for a wide range of cache sizes and across various numerical benchmark applications.
Mapping political support in the 1990s: A global analysis

Over the past quarter century, an unprecedented and often unanticipated wave of democratization has spread over large parts of the world. While some skepticism is reasonable regarding both the level and durability of many of the new experiments of democratization, the direction and scope of these developments are largely beyond dispute. The main goal of this essay is to use an unprecedented body of comparative survey research to map patterns and forms of political support across a wide range of political conditions. While the goal is primarily descriptive, in the course of the descriptions interesting themes emerge, such as the finding that there are no major trends suggesting a decline in support for democracy as a form of government, neither de jure nor de facto, or that the fact of dissatisfaction does not imply danger to the persistence or furtherance of democracy.
A New Competitive Strategy for Self Organizing Map Learning

This paper presents a new learning strategy for the clustering algorithms based on Self-Organizing Map. Our contribution relies on the competitive phase of this unsupervised learning algorithm and proposes a new strategy for choosing the most active cell/neuron. This new strategy is to choose the most active neuron taking into account its historical activations, learned in a voting matrix from the dataset. Indeed, the use of this historic neighbourhood, allows introducing of topological constraints in the final geometry of the map. This new unsupervised learning approach allows discovering of data structure with a better quality (lower topographic error and better clustering purity). The proposed approach was validated on multiple datasets of different sizes and complexities, and the experimental validation shows promising results.
Collaborative Refinery: A Collaborative Information Workspace for the World Wide Web

The conceptual framework of a new system, Collaborative Refinery, is motivated by a scenario involving the creation of an FAQ. The scenario introduces the concepts of collecting, culling, organizing and distilling. Distilling is a specialized form of collaborative authoring with support for content selection and genre. The Web-based user interface supporting access to the four conceptual functions is presened in detail. As well, the system architecture and a current implementation are described in detail. Several research directions are discussed with respect to Collaborative Refinery. Collaborative Refinery is related to prior research in personal information management, collaborative authoring, and shared workspaces. A common problem with large information sources, like the World Wide Web (WWW), Usenet news, or even a group memory system, is the difficulty of find useful information. The sheer volume of information prevents a novice from differentiating between the genuinely useful or interesting items and other less useful information. Summaries,
Catecholamine Excretion as Related to Cognitive and Emotional Reaction Patterns

&NA; Excretion rates of adrenaline and noradrenaline, performance in an audiovisual conflict test, and subjective reactions to the test as well as habitual response patterns were examined in 25 subjects. Subjects with high excretion rates of both hormones performed better during the entire stress session than did subjects with low excretion rates, the trend being particularly pronounced in respect to noradrenaline excretion. Subjects with high or with low excretion rates of both hormones had different time patterns of emotional involvement; high excretion rates were associated with a decrease and low excretion rates with an increase in the intensity of the reactions as the session progressed.
Nutrition or Detoxification: Why Bats Visit Mineral Licks of the Amazonian Rainforest

Many animals in the tropics of Africa, Asia and South America regularly visit so-called salt or mineral licks to consume clay or drink clay-saturated water. Whether this behavior is used to supplement diets with locally limited nutrients or to buffer the effects of toxic secondary plant compounds remains unclear. In the Amazonian rainforest, pregnant and lactating bats are frequently observed and captured at mineral licks. We measured the nitrogen isotope ratio in wing tissue of omnivorous short-tailed fruit bats, Carollia perspicillata, and in an obligate fruit-eating bat, Artibeus obscurus, captured at mineral licks and at control sites in the rainforest. Carollia perspicillata with a plant-dominated diet were more often captured at mineral licks than individuals with an insect-dominated diet, although insects were more mineral depleted than fruits. In contrast, nitrogen isotope ratios of A. obscurus did not differ between individuals captured at mineral lick versus control sites. We conclude that pregnant and lactating fruit-eating bats do not visit mineral licks principally for minerals, but instead to buffer the effects of secondary plant compounds that they ingest in large quantities during periods of high energy demand. These findings have potential implications for the role of mineral licks for mammals in general, including humans.
Persuading developers to "buy into" software process improvement: a local opinion and empirical evidence

In order to investigate practitioners' opinions of software process and software process improvement, we have collected a large volume of qualitative evidence from 13 companies. At the same time, other researchers have reported investigations of practitioners, and we are interested in how their reports may relate to our evidence. Thus, other research publications can also be treated as a form of qualitative data. In this paper, we review advice on a method, content analysis, which is used to analyse qualitative data. We use content analysis to describe and analyse discussions on software process and software process improvement. We report preliminary findings from an analysis of both the focus group evidence and four publications. Our main finding is that there is an apparent contradiction between developers saying that they want evidence for software process improvement, and what developers will accept as evidence. This presents a serious problem for research: even if researchers could demonstrate a strong, reliable relationship between software process improvement and improved organisational performance, there would still be the problem of convincing practitioners that the evidence applies to their particular situation.
Children’s Fears Post September 11

Increasingly, the Internet and global media are exposing children to images of war, disaster and terrorism. In addition, parents now seem to be more protective of children because of their own increasing fears of child abduction, sexual abuse, drug use, bullying and Internet paedophilia (Tucci, Mitchell, & Goddard, 2005). At the same time, parents also seem to be more indulgent of children’s unrealistic fears, often allowing them to avoid non-dangerous situations, being overprotective and encouraging less independence in their children (Hempenstall, 2003). This paper reports on a study that investigated whether children today have more worries and fears than did previous generations of children. The Fear Schedule Survey – Revised (FSSC-R) was administered to 220 children aged between 6 and 12 years, and the results for self-reported frequency, intensity and content of fears were compared with those of similar studies 10 and 20 years ago using the same instrument. The results are discussed in relation to their implications for helping parents understand and cope with children’s fears.
Natural Language Supported Relation Matching for Question Answering with Knowledge Graphs

This work focuses on the relation matching problem in knowledge based question answering systems. Finding the right relation a natural question asks is a key step in current knowledge based question answering systems, while also being the most difficult one, because of the mismatch between natural language question and formal relation type definitions. In this paper, we present two approaches to tackle this problem. The first approach tries to directly learn the soft match between the question and the relations from the training data using neural networks. The second approach enriches the relation name with natural language support sentences generated from Wikipedia, which provide additional matches with the question. Experiments on the WebQuestions dataset demonstrate that both of our approaches improve the relation matching accuracy of a prior state-of-the-art. Our further analysis reveals the high quality of support sentences and suggests the rich potential of support sentences in question answering and semantic parsing tasks.
Message/External-Body Content-ID Access Type

When using MIME [MIME] to encapsulate a structured object that consist of many elements, for example an SGML [SGML] document, a single element may occur several times. An encapsulation normally maps each of the structured objects elements to a MIME entity. It is useful to include elements that occur multiple time exactly once. To accomplish that and to preserve the object structure it is desirable to unambiguously refer to another body part of the same message.
Content-based retrieval of remote-sensed images using vector quantization

A new approach of using the VQ codewords as the remote sensed image features for content- based retrieval is proposed in this research. Different distortion measures are tried in the VQ stage to enhance the performance of the codewords as 'content descriptors' including classification accuracy. A system based approach has been taken to ensure that the features satisfy the different criteria imposed by a whole system. We implemented two main types of queries--query by class and query by value. The performance with respect to the former query was satisfactory while that for the latter query was excellent.
Structural Requirements for Activation of Latent Platelet-derived Growth Factor CC by Tissue Plasminogen Activator*

Platelet-derived growth factor C (PDGF-C) is one of four members in the PDGF family of growth factors, which are known mitogens and survival factors for cells of mesenchymal origin. PDGF-C has a unique two-domain structure consisting of an N-terminal CUB and a conserved C-terminal growth factor domain that are separated by a hinge region. PDGF-C is secreted as a latent dimeric factor (PDGF-CC), which undergoes extracellular removal of the CUB domains to become a PDGF receptor α agonist. Recently, the multidomain serine protease tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a thrombolytic agent used for treatment of acute ischemic stroke, was shown to cleave and activate PDGF-CC. In this study we determine the molecular mechanism of tPA-mediated activation of PDGF-CC. Using various PDGF-CC and tPA mutants, we were able to demonstrate that both the CUB and the growth factor domains of PDGF-C, as well as the kringle-2 domain of tPA, are required for the interaction and cleavage to occur. We also show that Arg231 in PDGF-C is essential for tPA-mediated proteolysis and that the released “free” CUB domain of PDGF-C can act as a competitive inhibitor of the cleavage reaction. Furthermore, we studied how the PDGF-C/tPA axis is regulated in primary fibroblasts and found that PDGF-C expression is down-regulated by hypoxia but induced by transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 treatment. Elucidating the regulation and the mechanism of tPA-mediated activation of PDGF-CC will advance our knowledge of the physiological function of PDGF-CC and tPA and may provide new therapeutic opportunities for thrombolytic and cardiovascular therapies.
Learning to Understand Image Content: Machine Learning Versus Machine Teaching Alternative

Understanding image information content was always a critical issue in every image handling or processing task. Up to now, the need for it was met by human knowledge that a domain expert or a system supervisor have contributed to a given application task. The advent of the Internet has drastically changed this state of affairs. Internet sources of visual information are diffused and dispersed over the whole Web, so the duty of information content evaluation must be relegated now to an image content understanding machine or a computer-based program capable to perform image content evaluation at a distant image location. Development of Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technologies is a natural move in the right direction. However. In this paper the author will argue that the basic assumptions underpinning the majority of CBIR designs are wrong and inappropriate, (like many other basic conceptions that computer vision community proudly holds at this time).
Cumulative record times in a Poisson process

We obtain a strong law of large numbers and a functional central limit theorem, as t → ∞, for the number of records up to time t and the Lebesgue measure (length) of the subset of the time interval [0, t] during which the Poisson process is in a record lifetime.
What should we say about the kurtosis?

In this work, we point out some important properties of the normalized fourth-order cumulant (i.e., the kurtosis). In addition, we emphasize the relation between the signal distribution and the sign of the kurtosis. One should mention that in many situations, authors claim that the sign of the kurtosis depends on the nature of the signal (i.e., over- or sub-Gaussian). For a unimodal probability density function, that claim is true and is clearly proved in the letter. But for more complex distributions, it has been shown that the kurtosis sign may change with parameters and does not depend only on the asymptotic behavior of the distributions. Finally, these results give theoretical explanation to techniques, like nonpermanent adaptation, used in nonstationary situations.
Spectral Components of the Radio Composite Supernova Remnant G11.2–0.3

We present a high-resolution radio study of the supernova remnant (SNR) G11.2-0.3 using archival Very Large Array data. Spectral tomography is performed to determine the properties of this composite-type SNR's individual components, which have only recently been distinguished through X-ray observations. Our results indicate that the spectral index of the pulsar wind nebula (PWN), or plerion, is αP = 0.25. We observe a spectral index of αS = 0.56 ± 0.02 throughout most of the SNR shell region but also detect a gradient in α in the southeastern component. We compare the spectral index and flux density with recent single-dish radio data of the source. Also, the radio efficiency and morphological properties of this PWN are found to be consistent with results for other known PWN systems.