Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disturbance-Generated Bifurcation in an Adaptive System with e1-Modification Law

The so-called e1-modification law proposed by Narendra and Annaswamy (1987) has been studied through a prototype adaptve control system, with a single unknown pole and an unknown constant disturbance at its input. This paper reveals that using this law in the case of regulation the system possesses multiple equilibria and undergoes various bifurcations.
Risk modeling and pricing of Euribor futures and options using the Ho-Lee model

The main purpose of this master thesis, commissioned by NASDAQ OMX is to study the risk neutral valuation of Fixed Income futures contracts and Fixed Income futures options. More specifically Euribor instruments were studied since they are the most liquid short rate contracts in Europe and hence have the best price picture. Specifying the dynamics of the short rate process to the Ho-Lee model we show the analytical formula for pricing Euribor futures contracts. The valuation method for pricing Euribor futures options is based on restricting the evolution of the short rate process to that of a recombining binomial tree. Also, the historical method for computing Value-at-Risk measure was implemented for portfolios consisting of Euribor futures and Euribor futures options.
Axonal regeneration and development of de novo axons from distal dendrites of adult feline commissural interneurons after a proximal axotomy

Following proximal axotomy, several types of neurons sprout de novo axons from distal dendrites. These processes may represent a means of forming new circuits following spinal cord injury. However, it is not know whether mammalian spinal interneurons, axotomized as a result of a spinal cord injury, develop de novo axons. Our goal was to determine whether spinal commissural interneurons (CINs), axotomized by 3–4‐mm midsagittal transection at C3, form de novo axons from distal dendrites. All experiments were performed on adult cats. CINs in C3 were stained with extracellular injections of Neurobiotin at 4–5 weeks post injury. The somata of axotomized CINs were identified by the presence of immunoreactivity for the axonal growth‐associated protein‐43 (GAP‐43). Nearly half of the CINs had de novo axons that emerged from distal dendrites. These axons lacked immunoreactivity for the dendritic protein, microtubule‐associated protein2a/b (MAP2a/b); some had GAP‐43‐immunoreactive terminals; and nearly all had morphological features typical of axons. Dendrites of other CINs did not give rise to de novo axons. These CINs did, however, each have a long axon‐like process (L‐ALP) that projected directly from the soma or a very proximal dendrite. L‐ALPs were devoid of MAP2a/b immunoreactivity. Some of these L‐ALPs projected through the lesion and formed bouton‐like swellings. These results suggest that proximally axotomized spinal interneurons have the potential to form new connections via de novo axons that emerge from distal dendrites. Others may be capable of regeneration of their original axon. J. Comp. Neurol. 502:1079–1097, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Functional Engraftment of the Medial Ganglionic Eminence Cells in Experimental Stroke Model

Currently there are no effective treatments targeting residual anatomical and behavioral deficits resulting from stroke. Evidence suggests that cell transplantation therapy may enhance functional recovery after stroke through multiple mechanisms. We used a syngeneic model of neural transplantation to explore graft–host communications that enhance cellular engraftment. The medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells were derived from 15-day-old transgenic rat embryos carrying green fluorescent protein (GFP), a marker, to easily track the transplanted cells. Adult rats were subjected to transient intraluminal occlusion of the medial cerebral artery. Two weeks after stroke, the grafts were deposited into four sites, along the rostro-caudal axis and medially to the stroke in the penumbra zone. Control groups included vehicle and fibroblast transplants. Animals were subjected to motor behavioral tests at 4 week posttransplant survival time. Morphological analysis demonstrated that the grafted MGE cells differentiated into multiple neuronal subtypes, established synaptic contact with host cells, increased the expression of synaptic markers, and enhanced axonal reorganization in the injured area. Initial patch-clamp recording demonstrated that the MGE cells received postsynaptic currents from host cells. Behavioral analysis showed reduced motor deficits in the rotarod and elevated body swing tests. These findings suggest that graft–host interactions influence the fate of grafted neural precursors and that functional recovery could be mediated by neurotrophic support, new synaptic circuit elaboration, and enhancement of the stroke-induced neuroplasticity.
Genome search for alcohol dependence using the weighted pairwise correlation linkage method: Interesting findings on chromosome 4

The nonparametric (model‐free) method of linkage analysis Weighted Pairwise Correlation (WPC) has been proposed by Commenges [1994], and extended to incorporate identity‐by‐descent (IBD) information [Zinn‐Justin and Abel, 1999]. We performed an autosome‐wide scan in the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism data using the WPC‐IBD method, considering two phenotypes related to alcohol dependence defined as residuals of binary traits adjusted for age and sex. Three chromosome 4 markers located in a region of 50 cM spanning from GABRB1 to D4S1651 provided Monte Carlo (MC) p‐values lower than 0.005, confirming the possible influence of β1 GABA receptor and ADH genes in alcoholism. Furthermore, marker D15S642, not far from the ALDH6 gene, provided an MC p‐value of 0.0005 in ethnic groups “White, Hispanic” and “White, non‐Hispanic. ”
Neuropsychological findings in children with benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes

Benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BCECTS) is a well‐known idiopathic age‐ and localization‐related epileptic syndrome with characteristic clinical and EEG manifestations. Due to the reported benign evolution of this epilepsy syndrome, neuropsychological assessment has been considered unnecessary. However, the benign nature of BCECTS has recently been challenged: verbal dysfunction as well as impaired visuomotor coordination, specific learning disabilities, and attention deficit have been noticed. These findings prompted this research study in which all children with BCECTS attending our epilepsy clinic underwent neuropsychological assessment. Seventeen children (10 boys and seven girls) aged 7 to 14 years were investigated with a neuropsychological test battery focusing on immediate and delayed recall of auditory‐verbal and visual material, verbal fluency, problem‐solving ability, and visuospatial constructional ability. Raven's coloured matrices and questionnaires regarding school functioning and behaviour were also administered. The children were matched with control subjects for age, sex, and school. Children with BCECTS had significantly lower scores than their control subject partners on the neuropsychological items. Intellectual abilities did not differ and neither did school functioning or behaviour according to teachers. Parents, however, recognized greater difficulties with concentration, temperament, and impulsiveness in children with BCECTS.
Meiotic cells monitor the status of the interhomolog recombination complex.

During meiosis, mutations that cause defects at intermediate stages in the recombination process confer arrest at the end of prophase (e.g., pachytene). In yeast, mutations of this type include rad50S, dmc1, rad51, and zip1. Rad50 is likely part of a recombination initiation complex. DMC1, RAD51, and ZIP1 encode two RecA homologs and a synaptonemal complex protein, respectively. We report here the effects of mutations in two other (meiosis-specific) genes, RED1 and MEK1/MRE4, that encode a chromosome structure component and a protein kinase, respectively. A red1 or mek1/mre4 mutation alleviates completely rad50S, dmc1, rad51, and zip1 arrest. Furthermore, the red1 and mek1/mre4 mutations define a unique, previously unrecognized aspect of recombination imposed very early in the process, during DSB formation. Finally, the red1 and mek1/mre4 mutations appear to alleviate prophase arrest directly rather than by eliminating, or permitting bypass of, the rad50S, dmc1, rad51, or zip1 defects. These and other observations suggest that a meiosis-specific regulatory surveillance process monitors the status of the protein/DNA interhomolog recombination machinery as an integral entity, in its proper chromosomal context, and dependent upon its appropriate Red1 and Mek1/Mre4-promoted development. We speculate that a properly developed recombination complex emits an inhibitory signal to delay progression of meiotic cells out of prophase until or unless the recombination process has progressed, at least past certain critical steps, and perhaps to completion.
Repeated mild brain injuries result in cognitive impairment in B6C3F1 mice.

Experimental investigations of single mild brain injury (SMI) show relatively little resultant cognitive impairment. However, repeated mild brain injuries (RMI), as those sustained by athletes (e.g., football, hockey, and soccer players) may have cumulative effects on cognitive performance and neuropathology. Numerous clinical studies show persistent, latent, and long-term consequences of RMI, unlike the episodic nature of SMI. The nature of repeated traumatic brain injury (TBI) introduces confounding factors in invasive and even semiinvasive animal models of brain injury (e.g., scar formation). Thus, the present study characterizes SMI and RMI in a noninvasive mouse weight drop model and the cumulative effects of RMI on cognitive performance. Investigation of drop masses and drop distances revealed masses of 50, 100, and 150 g dropped from 40 cm resulted in 0% mortality, no skull fracture, and no difference in acute neurological assessment following sham injury, SMI, or RMI. Cumulative effects of RMI were examined following four mild brain injuries 24 h apart induced by 50-, 100-, or 150-g masses dropped from 40 cm through histological measures, mean arterial pressure, and measures of complex/spatial learning. RMI produced no overt cell death within the cortex or hippocampus, no evidence of blood-brain barrier compromise, and no significant change in mean arterial pressure. Following testing in the Morris water maze (MWM) on days 7-11 after initial injury, mice in the RMI 100-g and RMI 150-g groups had significantly longer MWM goal latencies compared to sham, SMI 150-g, and RMI 50-groups. Additionally, the evident cognitive deficit manifested in the absence of observed cell death. This is the first study to show complex/spatial learning deficits following RMI, similar to the visual/spatial perception and planning deficits observed in clinical studies.
An efficient differencing algorithm based on suffix array for reprogramming wireless sensor networks

Wireless reprogramming is a crucial technique for managing large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is, however, energy intensive to disseminate the code to enable reprogramming. Incremental reprogramming is a promising approach to reduce the dissemination cost. In incremental reprogramming, only the delta between the new code and the old code needs to be disseminated, resulting much less energy consumption. The differencing algorithm plays a key role in incremental reprogramming. It takes inputs of two successive versions of codes and generates a small delta script for dissemination. Existing incremental algorithms have several limitations. First, they do not ensure the smallest delta size for dissemination. Second, some of them may incur a large overhead in terms of execution time and memory consumption. To address these issues, we propose DASA, an efficient differencing algorithm based on suffix array. DASA performs byte-level comparison and ensure the optimal result in terms of the delta size. Moreover, DASA has a low execution overhead. The time complexity and space complexity of DASA are O(n log n) and O(n), respectively. To the best of our knowledge, DASA is the optimal algorithm with the lowest time and space complexity for reprogramming WSNs.
Acute Lower Extremity Injury Rates Increase after Concussion in College Athletes.

UNLABELLED Dynamic postural control deficits and disrupted cortical pathways have been reported to persist beyond an athlete's return to activity after concussion, potentially increasing the risk of acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury. PURPOSE This study aimed to investigate acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury rates before and after concussion in athletes with concussion and their matched control. METHODS College athletes with concussion (n = 44; age, 20.0 ± 1.2 yr) were physician-diagnosed. Nonconcussed college athletes (n = 58; age, 20.5 ± 1.3 yr) were matched to individuals with concussion. Acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury data were collected for 2 yr (±1 yr of the diagnosed concussion) using electronic medical records. Control participants' 2-yr window for exposure and musculoskeletal injury data were anchored to their match's concussion injury date. Pre- and postconcussion musculoskeletal injury rates were calculated for 90-, 180-, and 365-d periods for both study cohorts. Risk ratios were calculated to determine differences within and between groups for all periods. RESULTS Within 1 yr after concussion, the group with concussion was 1.97 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.19-3.28; P = 0.01) times more likely to have experienced an acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after concussion than before concussion and 1.64 times (95% CI, 1.07-2.51; P = 0.02) more likely to have experienced an acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after concussion than their matched nonconcussed cohort over the same period. Up to 180 d after concussion, the group with concussion was 2.02 (95% CI, 1.08-3.78; P = 0.02) times more likely to have experienced an acute lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after concussion than before concussion. CONCLUSIONS Previous literature has identified dynamic postural control deficits along with increased motor evoked potential latency and decreased amplitude after concussion, suggesting that the brain may be unable to effectively coordinate movement. Our findings underscore the need to explore functional movement and dynamic postural control assessments in postconcussion injury assessment protocols.
Generating an Efficient Broadcast Sequence Using Reflected Gray Codes

One-to-all broadcast is frequently implemented on multicomputers using a binomial tree communication pattern. The source processor, at the root of the broadcast tree, completes the broadcast before the processors at the leaves of the tree. This imbalance can degrade performance when a data-parallel algorithm requires a series of broadcasts from different source processors. In this paper, we show that using a reflected Gray code to order broadcasts minimizes the communication time.
An Enhanced Topic Modeling Approach to Multiple Stance Identification

People often publish online texts to express their stances, which reflect the essential viewpoints they stand. Stance identification has been an important research topic in text analysis and facilitates many applications in business, public security and government decision making. Previous work on stance identification solely focuses on classifying the supportive or unsupportive attitude towards a certain topic/entity. The other important type of stance identification, multiple stance identification, was largely ignored in previous research. In contrast, multiple stance identification focuses on identifying different standpoints of multiple parties involved in online texts. In this paper, we address the problem of recognizing distinct standpoints implied in textual data. As people are inclined to discuss the topics favorable to their standpoints, topics thus can provide distinguishable information of different standpoints. We propose a topic-based method for standpoint identification. To acquire more distinguishable topics, we further enhance topic model by adding constraints on document-topic distributions. We finally conduct experimental studies on two real datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approach to multiple stance identification.
Extracellular Matrix: A Matter of Life and Death

Extracellular matrix (ECM) is an essential component of the stromal microenvironment both from a structural and a functional point of view. The ECM functions as a scaffold for tissue organization and regulates growth factors and chemokines availability thus contributing to maintain tissue homeostasis. Attachment of cells to ECM is essential to support cell survival, growth, and proliferation, and the lack of these interactions can trigger a type of cell death named anoikis. Several studies point out that alterations of ECM composition are often responsible of many pathological conditions such as cancer, of which it has been demonstrated to be occasionally the main promoter. ECM does not always represent a prosurvival stimulus; among the different array of ECM molecules a set of proteins can negatively affect cell viability and are thought to play an important role in tumor progression. For this reason attention has been focused on these molecules as potential tools or targets for therapy.
India: the next superpower?: the untold story of India's economy

As India looks towards further liberalisation, it must first prepare its economic institutions by re-orienting them from managing the economy to regulating the economy. Without an enhancement of regulatory capacity, increased liberalisation will simply perpetuate corruption and further inequality. By improving regulatory capacity, the state can better focus on the socio-economic aspects of governance that will be so important for India’s future. In order to better direct and manage institutional change in India, we must first look to history to understand how India’s economic infrastructure was built.
Predominant recognition of the ESAT-6 protein in the first phase of interferon with Mycobacterium bovis in cattle

Tuberculosis continues to be a worldwide health problem for both humans and animals. The development of improved vaccines and diagnostic tests requires detailed understanding of the immune responses generated and the antigens recognized during the disease. This study examined the T-cell response which develops in cattle experimentally infected with Mycobacterium bovis. The first significant T-cell response was found 3 weeks after the onset of infection and was characterized by a pronounced gamma interferon (IFN-gamma) response from peripheral blood mononuclear cells directed to antigens in culture filtrates. Short-term culture filtrate (ST-CF) was separated into molecular mass fractions and screened for recognition by T cells from experimentally infected and field cases of bovine tuberculosis. Cattle in the early stages of experimental infection were characterized by strong IFN-gamma responses directed predominantly toward the lowest-mass (<10-kDa) fraction of ST-CF, but cattle in later stages of experimental infection (16 weeks postinfection) exhibited a broader recognition of antigens of various molecular masses. Field cases of bovine tuberculosis, in comparison, preferentially recognized low-mass antigens, characteristic of animals in the early stages of infection. The major T-cell target for this dominant IFN-gamma response was found to be the secreted antigen ESAT-6. This antigen was recognized strongly by the majority of field cases of bovine tuberculosis tested. As ESAT-6 is unique to pathogenic mycobacterial species, our study suggests that ESAT-6 is an antigen with major potential for vaccination against and specific diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis.
Diet Transition and Supermarket Shopping Behaviour: Is There a Link?

Supermarkets are leading the transformation of food markets in Asia, yet few studies have examined the impact of this so-called supermarket revolution on diet transition and the related nutritional and health implications. We use data from a sample of 1,180 urban households in Indonesia to explore the relation between the increased use of modern food-retail outlets and the emergence of unhealthy dietary patterns. The results of our ordinary least-squares and instrumental variables regressions suggest a negative and significant relation between the share of food expenditure at modern food retailers and the healthiness of consumer food purchases, even after we control for other characteristics that may influence foodconsumption decisions.
Detecting and classifying frontal, back and profile views of humans

Detecting and estimating the presence and pose of a person in an image is a challenging problem. Literature has dealt with this as two separate problems. In this paper, we propose a system that introduces novel steps to segment the foreground object from the back ground and classifies the pose of the detected human as frontal, profile or back view. We use this as a front end to an intelligent environment we are developing to assist individuals who are blind in office spaces. The traditional background subtraction often results in silhouettes that are discontinuous, containing holes. We have incorporated the graph cut algorithm on top of background subtraction result and have observed a significant improvement in the performance of segmentation yielding continuous silhouettes without any holes. We then extract shape context features from the silhouette for training a classifier to distinguish between profile and nonprofile(frontal or back) views. Our system has shown promising results by achieving an accuracy of 87.5% for classifying profile and non profile views using an SVM on the real data sets that we have collected for our experiments.
Rapid upregulation of GLUT-4 and MCT-4 expression during 16 h of heavy intermittent cycle exercise.

In this study, we have investigated the hypothesis that an exercise protocol designed to repeatedly induce a large dependence on carbohydrate and large increases in glycolytic flux rate would result in rapid increases in the principal glucose and lactate transporters in working muscle, glucose transporter (GLUT)-4 and monocarboxylate transporter (MCT)4, respectively, and in activity of hexokinase (Hex), the enzyme used to phosphorylate glucose. Transporter abundance and Hex activity were assessed in homogenates by Western blotting and quantitative chemiluminescence and fluorometric techniques, respectively, in samples of tissue obtained from the vastus lateralis in 12 untrained volunteers [peak aerobic power (.VO(2peak)) = 44.3 +/- 2.3 ml.kg(-1). min(-1)] before cycle exercise at repetitions 1 (R1), 2 (R2), 9 (R9), and 16 (R16). The 16 repetitions of the exercise were performed for 6 min at approximately 90% . VO(2peak), once per hour. Compared with R1, GLUT-4 increased (P < 0.05) by 28% at R2 and remained elevated (P < 0.05) at R9 and R16. For MCT-4, increases (P < 0.05) of 24% were first observed at R9 and persisted at R16. No changes were observed in GLUT-1 and MCT-1 or in Hex activity. The approximately 17- to 24-fold increase (P < 0.05) in muscle lactate observed at R1 and R2 was reduced (P < 0.05) to an 11-fold increase at R9 and R16. It is concluded that an exercise protocol designed to strain muscle carbohydrate reserves and to result in large increases in lactic acid results in a rapid upregulation of both GLUT-4 and MCT-4.