Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid Evolution of Functional Complexity in a Domain Family

Synthetic PDZ domain variants with random mutations reveal the remarkable robustness of this domain for ligand recognition. Expanding the Universe of PDZ Domains PDZ domains are peptide recognition modules that typically recognize specific C-terminal sequences, and scaffold proteins containing these domains are important for organizing specialized cellular structures, such as epithelial junctions, neuronal postsynaptic densities, and immunological synapses. PDZ domains exhibit limited sequence conservation; thus Ernst et al. developed a set of PDZ domain variants to study how this family can evolve to produce domains with different binding specificities. They show that random mutations in the binding site of the Erbin PDZ domain produce stable PDZ domains that have specificities that are either similar to those in nature or are new specificities not found in naturally occurring PDZ domains. A selective pressure for ligand binding was not required to produce PDZ variants that bound ligands. The presence of specificities not found in nature suggests that nature has not exhausted the specificity potential of the PDZ fold and that these domains may continue to evolve, leading to new networks of protein interactions. Alternatively, protein interaction networks may be experimentally rewired by synthetic PDZ domains. Multicellular organisms rely on complex, fine-tuned protein networks to respond to environmental changes. We used in vitro evolution to explore the role of domain mutation and expansion in the evolution of network complexity. Using random mutagenesis to facilitate family expansion, we asked how versatile and robust the binding site must be to produce the rich functional diversity of the natural PDZ domain family. From a combinatorial protein library, we analyzed several hundred structured domain variants and found that one-quarter were functional for carboxyl-terminal ligand recognition and that our variant repertoire was as specific and diverse as the natural family. Our results show that ligand binding is hardwired in the PDZ fold and suggest that this flexibility may facilitate the rapid evolution of complex protein interaction networks.
Perceptual image quality enhancement for solar radio image

In solar radio observation, the visualization of data is very important since it can more intuitively and clearly deliver interest information of solar radio activities to astronomers. As to visualization, we highly expect good visual quality of images/videos in favor of the discovery of solar radio events recorded by observation data. The existing imaging system cannot guarantee good visual quality of solar radio data visualization. In this paper, an image quality enhancement algorithm is developed to improve solar radio extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Firstly, the guided filter is employed to smooth image, which outputs an image with good skeleton and edges. Since the fine structures of solar radio activities are embedded in high frequency components of a solar radio image, we propose a novel structure preserving filtering to amplify the different signal of original input image subtracting smoothed one. Afterwards, fusing the amplified details and smoothed one together, the final enhanced image is generated. The experimental results prove that the image quality is significantly improved by using the proposed image quality enhancement algorithm.
Resting cellular and physiological effects of freewheel running.

INTRODUCTION/PURPOSE Exercise modulates many aspects of physiology. The purpose of the current experiment was to characterize the impact of regular, moderate physical activity on resting, baseline measures of cellular immunity blood lipids, and muscle enzyme. METHODS Male Fischer 344 rats were housed with either mobile (run, N = 10) or immobile (sedentary, N = 10) running wheels. After 4 wk of running, rats were sacrificed. Blood and muscle (long and medial heads of the triceps) were collected. From blood, white blood cell (WBC) differentials, red blood cell (RBC) count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, and lipid profiles were measured. Muscle citrate synthase (CS) activity was measured by spectrophotometric analysis. RESULTS Rats ran an average of 9.89 +/- 0.79 km.wk(-1). There were no differences in the total number of circulating WBC, RBC, or eosinophils. Freewheel running decreased the number of circulating neutrophils (P < 0.001), monocytes (P < 0.01), and basophils (P < 0.01), while increasing the number of lymphocytes (P < 0.001), when compared with sedentary animals. Mean corpuscular content of hemoglobin was elevated in the freewheel group (P < 0.01). Physically active animals had slightly lower triglycerides and LDL, and elevated HDL. These changes resulted in a significant improvement in LDL/HDL ratio (P < 0.05). Muscle CS activity was unchanged between groups. CONCLUSION Both the alterations in the RBC hemoglobin and lipid proteins are positive health changes associated with exercise training. The impact of the alterations in WBC differentials remains unknown but could indicate a reduction in inflammatory load. In conclusion, freewheel running provides sufficient exercise stimulus to produce some, but not all, training associated physiological adaptations.
Towards the Conversion of National Corpus of Polish to Universal Dependencies

The research presented in this paper aims at enriching the manually morphosyntactically annotated part of National Corpus of Polish (NKJP1M) with a syntactic layer, i.e. dependency trees of sentences, and at converting both dependency trees and morphosyntactic annotations of particular tokens to Universal Dependencies. The dependency layer is built using a semi-automatic annotation procedure. The sentences from NKJP1M are first parsed with a dependency parser trained on Polish Dependency Bank, i.e. the largest bank of Polish dependency trees. The predicted dependency trees and the morphosyntactic annotations of tokens are then automatically converted into UD dependency graphs. NKJP1M sentences are an essential part of Polish Dependency Bank, we thus replace some automatically predicted dependency trees with their manually annotated equivalents. The final dependency treebank consists of 86K trees (including 15K gold-standard trees). A natural language pre-processing model trained on the enlarged set of (possibly noisy) dependency trees outperforms a model trained on a smaller set of the gold-standard trees in predicting part-of-speech tags, morphological features, lemmata, and labelled dependency trees
Improving Sentence Boundary Detection for Spoken Language Transcripts

This paper presents experiments on sentence boundary detection in transcripts of spoken dialogues. Segmenting spoken language into sentence-like units is a challenging task, due to disfluencies, ungrammatical or fragmented structures and the lack of punctuation. In addition, one of the main bottlenecks for many NLP applications for spoken language is the small size of the training data, as the transcription and annotation of spoken language is by far more time-consuming and labour-intensive than processing written language. We therefore investigate the benefits of data expansion and transfer learning and test different ML architectures for this task. Our results show that data expansion is not straightforward and even data from the same domain does not always improve results. They also highlight the importance of modelling, i.e. of finding the best architecture and data representation for the task at hand. For the detection of boundaries in spoken language transcripts, we achieve a substantial improvement when framing the boundary detection problem assentence pair classification task, as compared to a sequence tagging approach.
Vav2 as a Rac-GDP/GTP Exchange Factor Responsible for the Nectin-induced, c-Src- and Cdc42-mediated Activation of Rac*

Nectins are Ca2+-independent immunoglobulin-like cell-cell adhesion molecules that form homo- and hetero-trans-dimers (trans-interactions). Nectins first form cell-cell contact and then recruit cadherins to the nectin-based cell-cell contact sites to form adherens junctions cooperatively with cadherins. In addition, the trans-interactions of nectins induce the activation of Cdc42 and Rac small G proteins, which enhances the formation of adherens junctions by forming filopodia and lamellipodia, respectively. The trans-interactions of nectins first recruit and activate c-Src at the nectin-based cell-cell contact sites. c-Src then phosphorylates and activates FRG, a Cdc42-GDP/GTP exchange factor (GEF) for Cdc42. The activation of both c-Src and Cdc42 by FRG is necessary for the activation of Rac, but the Rac-GEF responsible for this activation of Rac remains unknown. We showed here that the nectin-induced activation of Rac was inhibited by a dominant negative mutant of Vav2, a Rac-GEF. Nectins recruited and tyrosine-phosphorylated Vav2 through c-Src at the nectin-based cell-cell contact sites, whereas Cdc42 was not necessary for the nectin-induced recruitment of Vav2 or the nectin-induced, c-Src-mediated tyrosine phosphorylation of Vav2. Cdc42 activated through c-Src then enhanced the GEF activity of tyrosine-phosphorylated Vav2 on Rac1. These results indicate that Vav2 is a GEF responsible for the nectin-induced, c-Src-, and Cdc42-mediated activation of Rac.
Impact of medical homes on quality, healthcare utilization, and costs.

OBJECTIVES To assess baseline quality metrics, healthcare utilization, and costs of commercially insured patients treated at practices participating in a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) pilot. STUDY DESIGN Observational cohort study utilizing claims data for patients treated at PCMH and non-PCMH practices. METHODS Data from Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, 1 of 14 plans in the HealthCore Integrated Research Database, were queried for patients identified based on visits to PCMH and non-PCMH practices during 2007-2008; outcome metrics were formulated from the baseline calendar year, 2009. Differences in healthcare utilization were determined with x(2) and 2-sample t tests. Regression models were used to test differences in adjusted emergency department (ED) use, inpatient services, and costs. RESULTS The study included 31,032 PCMH and 350,015 non-PCMH patients. Among PCMH-treated patients, diabetics had higher rates of glycated hemoglobin testing; cardiovascular disease patients had higher rates of testing and better low-density lipoprotein cholesterol control; imaging rates for low back pain were lower; among pediatric patients, inappropriate antibiotic use for nonspecific or viral respiratory infections was lower. PCMH-treated adults and children had 12% and 23% lower odds of hospitalization, and required 11% and 17% fewer ED services, respectively, than non-PCMH patients. Risk-adjusted total per member per month costs were 8.6% and 14.5% lower for PCMH-treated pediatric and adult patients, respectively (P <.01). CONCLUSIONS PCMH practices in this pilot were associated with better preventive health, higher levels of disease management, and lower resource utilization and costs in 2009 compared with practices not pursuing PCMH status.
Polysilicon piezoresistive cantilevers for intermolecular force detection

We describe the development of polycrystalline silicon piezoresistive micro/nanocantilevers for the measurement of intermolecular forces in biochemical sensing. The cantilevers have been fabricated both in a dedicated technology and in a commercial CMOS technology with an additional micromachining postprocessing. The sensitivity and resolution required by the application are achieved with cantilevers with submicrometer thickness and width in the micrometer range. The cantilevers have been successfully tested by applying a known displacement with an AFM, obtaining a value of 12 for the gauge factor.
Flin Flon: A Study of Company-Community Relations in a Single Enterprise Community

Le developpement de Flin Flon, veritable localite mono-industrielle, repose dans une grande mesure sur la politique de La Compagnie miniere et metallurgique de la Baie d’Hudson Limitee. A l’epoque de son etablissement, La Compagnie se chargeait de l’expansion industrielle et de la communaute mais, au gre des circonstances, elle parvint a se defaire de tous projets visant la collectivite. En effet, lorsque Flin Flon fut constitue en corporation de ville en 1946, la Compagnie ne s’integrait plus directement aux activites de la communaute. La Compagnie miniere et metallurgique de la Baie d’Hudson Limitee etait d’autant plus portee a envisager comme distincts l’un de l’autre les interets de la communaute et du commerce que cette dissociation allait de paire avec l’offre de travail. Il en ressort que la participation de la Compagnie au developpement de la communaute etait fonction de la main-d’oeuvre, a un point tel que, lorsqu’elle put finalement s’assurer une population active, La Compagnie miniere et metallurgique de la Baie d’Hudson Limitee se retira des activites communautaires.
Web-derived Emotional Word Detection in social media using Latent Semantic information

Public sentiment permeated through social media is usually regarded as an important measure for public opinion monitoring, policy making, and so forth. However, the deluge of user-generated content in web, especially in social platform, causes great challenge to public sentiment analysis tasks. Therefore, Web-derived Emotional Word Detection (WEWD) is proposed as a fundamental tool aims to alleviate this problem. Most previous works on WEWD focus on rules, syntax, and sentence structures, a few utilize semantic information which has the potential to further increase the accuracy and efficiency of WEWD. In this paper, we propose a Global-Local Latent Semantic (GLLS) framework for WEWD to make a full use of latent semantic information with the help of multiple sense word embedding technology. We devise two computational WEWD models, called Ensemble GLLS (EGLLS) and Deep GLLS (DGLLS). EGLLS exploits an ensemble learning way to fuse the global and local latent semantics while DGLLS takes advantage of deep neural network. We also design an old-new corpus enrich technique to help increase the effectiveness of the overall training and detecting process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which applies multiple sense word embedding and deep neural network in WEWD related tasks. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed idea and methods.
Partial discharges in liquid embedded power electronics: Effects of pressure and liquid nature under negative pulse voltage stress

There is a need to develop pressure tolerant insulation for power electronic converters used for oil exploitation at deep sea environment. This paper presents an experimental investigation of partial discharges (PDs) along a trench between metallization edges on printed circuit boards (PCBs) embedded in different insulating liquid under unipolar negative fast transient voltages using optical PD detection system. The liquids studied are Nytro 10XN mineral oil, Midel 7131 synthetic ester and Galden fluorinated liquid. Midel has the highest PD inception voltage (PDIV) of 22 kV with high PD magnitude and followed by breakdown at 23 kV. Galden has PDIV of 19 kV with low PD magnitude. Nytro has PDIV of 9 kV with PD magnitude that increased gradually till breakdown. Covering the trench with parylene resulted in PDIV that ranges from 18 kV to 20 kV with similar PD magnitude. It is quite clear from the results that the nature of the encapsulation materials has significant effect on the insulation integrity of power electronic modules.
PWM switching strategy for the elimination of common mode voltage of a two-level inverter drive with an open-end winding induction motor configuration

Adjustable speed drives are known to generate common mode voltages which cause motor shaft voltages and bearing currents. It was demonstrated that two two-level inverters connected to either sides of an open-end winding induction motor is capable of achieving the functionally of a three-level inverter. The common mode voltage generated by a three-level inverter can be eliminated by switching only the voltage space vector combinations which do not produce the common mode voltage. A PWM switching strategy to eliminate the common mode voltages using an open-end winding induction motor drive is presented in this paper, which tends to avoid the electrostatic coupling of the stator and rotor reducing the bearing currents and leakage currents. The present scheme uses single DC-link with about 58% of the DC-voltage compared to conventional two-level VSI.
Identify gaps between local and international measures to avoid administration error on 1-year review in United Christian Hospital, Hong Kong

Many medication errors could be avoided if administration was more closely linked with structured monitoring. The contributory factors to administration errors occurred in one recent year were reviewed and identified contributory factors to errors as six domains of administration principles according to the report from the Quality and Safety website. The current measures including guidelines, policy, and practices to prevent the administration errors identified in the previous step were searched from the United Christian Hospital (UCH) homepage. Meanwhile, the international measures suggested in literature were identified to address the administration errors identified. 41 cases were identified as medication errors related to administration error events, with total twenty contributory factors identified according to the incident report which identified five contributory factors as common causes. Measures to prevent interruption of medication round and measures to improve individual knowledge and skills, and personal responsebility were suggested to fill the gaps. The medication administration errors should be avoided through both education reinforcing programme and preventive interventions of distraction or interruption to the procedure after comparing the existing measures to the suggested measures from literature. This study was so important to improve the current measures to prevent medication administration errors.
Problematic formulations of SAS PROC.MIXED models for repeated measurements.

The work reported in this article was undertaken to evaluate the utility of SAS PROC.MIXED for testing hypotheses concerning GROUP and TIME x GROUP effects in repeated measurements designs with drop-outs. If dropouts are not completely at random, covariate control over informative individual differences on which dropout data patterns depend is widely recognized to be important. However, the inclusion of baseline scores and time-in-study as between-subject covariates in an otherwise well formulated SAS PROC.MIXED model resulted in inadequate control over type I error in simulated data with or without drop-outs present. The inadequate model formulations and resulting deviant test sizes are presented here as a warning for others who might be guided by the same information sources to employ similar model specifications when analyzing data from actual clinical trials. It is important that the complete model specification be provided in detail when reporting applications of the general linear mixed-model procedure. A single random-coefficients model produced appropriate test sizes, but it provided inferior power when informative covariates were added in the attempt to adjust for dropouts. As an alternative, the incorporation of covariate controls in simpler two-stage endpoint or random regression analyses is documented to be effective in dealing with dropouts under specifiable conditions.
Reproducing Monolingual, Multilingual and Cross-Lingual CEFR Predictions

his study aims to reproduce the research of Vajjala and Rama (2018) which showed that it is possible to predict the quality of a text written by learners of a given language by means of a model built on the basis of texts written by learners of another language. These authors also pointed out that POStag and dependency n-grams were significantly more effective than text length and global linguistic indices frequently used for this kind of task. The analyses performed show that some important points of their code did not correspond to the explanations given in the paper. These analyses confirm the possibility to use syntactic n-gram features in cross-lingual experiments to categorize texts according to their CEFR level (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). However, text length and some classical indexes of readability are much more effective in the monolingual and the multilingual experiments than what Vajjala and Rama concluded and are even the best performing features when the cross-lingual task is seen as a regression problem. This study emphasized the importance for reproducibility of setting explicitly the reading order of the instances when using a K-fold CV procedure and, more generally, the need to properly randomize these instances before. It also evaluates a two-step procedure to determine the degree of statistical significance of the differences observed in a K-fold cross-validation schema and argues against the use of a Bonferroni-type correction in this context.
Increased levels of prostaglandin D(2) suggest macrophage activation in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension.

STUDY OBJECTIVE TXA(2) (thromboxane A(2)) is a lipid mediator believed to be produced primarily by platelets in normal subjects, although macrophages are capable of synthesis. There is increased production of TXA(2) in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH), which may reflect augmented production by macrophages. The objective of this study was to determine if macrophages are activated in PPH and whether they contribute to the increased production of TXA(2). STUDY TYPE Case control. SETTING University hospital. METHODS We measured the urinary metabolites of three mediators that predominantly derive from different cell types in vivo: (1) TX-M (platelets and macrophages), a TXA(2) metabolite; (2) prostaglandin D(2) (PGD(2)) metabolite (PGD-M); and (3) N-methylhistamine (mast cells), a histamine metabolite, in 12 patients with PPH and 11 normal subjects. RESULTS The mean (+/- SEM) excretion of both TX-M and PGD-M at baseline was increased in PPH patients, compared to normal subjects (460 +/- 50 pg/mg creatinine vs 236 +/- 16 pg/mg creatinine [p = 0.0006], and 1,390 +/- 221 pg/mg creatinine vs 637 +/- 65 pg/mg creatinine [p = 0.005], respectively). N-methylhistamine excretion was not increased compared to normal subjects. There was a poor correlation between excretion of TX-M and PGD-M (r = 0.36) and between excretion of PGD-M and methylhistamine (r = 0.09) in individual patients. CONCLUSION In patients with PPH, increased levels of PGD-M, without increased synthesis of N-methylhistamine, suggest that macrophages are activated. The lack of correlation between urinary metabolite levels of TXA(2) and PGD(2) implies that macrophages do not contribute substantially to elevated TXA(2) production in patients with PPH. They may, however, have a role in the pathogenesis and/or maintenance of PPH, which warrants further investigation.