Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Neuron Specific Formin Delphilin Nucleates Actin Filaments but Does Not Enhance Elongation

The formin Delphilin binds the glutamate receptor, GluRδ2, in dendritic spines of Purkinje cells. Both proteins play a role in learning. To understand how Delphilin functions in neurons, we studied the actin assembly properties of this formin. Formins have a conserved formin homology 2 domain, which nucleates and remains associated with the fast growing end of actin filaments, influencing filament growth with input from the adjacent formin homology 1 domain. The strength of nucleation and elongation varies widely across formins. Additionally, most formins have conserved domains that regulate actin assembly through an intramolecular interaction. Delphilin is distinct from other formins in several ways: its expression is limited to Purkinje cells; it lacks autoinhibitory domains; its formin homology 1 domains has minimal proline-rich sequence. We found that Delphilin is an actin nucleator that does not accelerate elongation, although it binds tightly to the barbed end of filaments. In addition, Delphilin exhibits a preference for actin isoforms, which has not been described or systematically studied in other formins. Finally, Delphilin is the first formin studied that is not regulated by intramolecular interactions. We speculate how the activity we observe is consistent with its localization in the small dendritic spines. Abbreviations: FH1, formin homology 1; FH2, formin homology 2; DID, diaphanous inhibitory domain; DAD, diaphanous autoinhibitory domain; LTD, long term depression; PSD, post synaptic density; PDZ, post synaptic density protein (PSD95), Drosophila disc large tumor suppressor (Dlg1), and zonula occludens-1 protein (zo-1).
Multichain Markov Decision Processes with a Sample Path Constraint: A Decomposition Approach

We consider finite-state finite-action Markov decision processes which accumulate both a reward and a cost at each decision epoch. We study the problem of finding a policy that maximizes the expected long-run average reward subject to the constraint that the long-run average cost be no greater than a given value with probability one. We establish that if there exists a policy that meets the constraint, then there exists an e-optimal stationary policy. Furthermore, an algorithm is outlined to locate the e-optimal stationary policy. The proof of the result hinges on a decomposition of the state space into maximal recurrent classes and a set of transient states.
Nasal obstruction and obstructive sleep apnea: a review.

Several groups of investigators have assessed the impact of nasal obstruction on the obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. These studies evaluated patients with either naturally occurring partial nasal obstruction (e.g., allergic rhinitis, septal deviation) or experimentally induced nasal occlusion. The results of these studies are summarized and discussed in this article.
The innate immune molecule, NOD1, regulates direct killing of Helicobacter pylori by antimicrobial peptides

The cytosolic innate immune molecule, NOD1, recognizes peptidoglycan (PG) delivered to epithelial cells via the Helicobacter pylori cag pathogenicity island (cagPAI), and has been implicated in host defence against cagPAI+H. pylori bacteria. To further clarify the role of NOD1 in host defence, we investigated NOD1‐dependent regulation of human β‐defensins (DEFBs) in two epithelial cell lines. Our findings identify that NOD1 activation, via either cagPAI+ bacteria or internalized PG, was required for DEFB4 and DEFB103 expression in HEK293 cells. To investigate cell type‐specific induction of DEFB4 and DEFB103, we generated stable NOD1‘knockdown’ (KD) and control AGS cells. Reporter gene assay and RT‐PCR analyses revealed that only DEFB4 was induced in an NOD1‐/cagPAI‐dependent fashion in AGS cells. Moreover, culture supernatants from AGS control, but not AGS NOD1 KD cells, stimulated with cagPAI+H. pylori, significantly reduced H. pylori bacterial numbers. siRNA studies confirmed that human β‐defensin 2 (hBD‐2), but not hBD‐3, contributes to the antimicrobial activity of AGS cell supernatants against H. pylori. This study demonstrates, for the first time, the involvement of NOD1 and hBD‐2 in direct killing of H. pylori bacteria by epithelial cells and confirms the importance of NOD1 in host defence mechanisms against cagPAI+H. pylori infection.
The Impact of Mutual Fund Manager Gender on Investor Capital Allocations

This study aims to understand whether the gender of mutual fund managers impacts investors’ capital allocation decisions to US mutual funds. This study uses net alpha as an indication of proper capital allocation, as higher net alpha indicates not enough capital, and uses value added (gross alpha multiplied by fund size) as an indication of skill, as higher value added indicates higher skill given that capital is allocated properly (Berk and van Binsbergen 2015). This research utilized the Morningstar database to gather information on 5,000 US mutual funds to compare net alpha and value added between male funds and female funds. The present research found that female managers have statistically significantly higher net alpha and higher value added, compared to male managers, likely indicating that females are not allocated enough capital but have higher skill, as they are able to extract high value added even without proper capital allocation.
The Augmented Composite Banyan Network

A new multipath multistage interconnection network called the Augmented Composite Banyan Network (ACBN) is proposed. The ACBN is created by adding a link to each SE of the Composite Banyan Network (CBN), which is a multipath network with at least two disjoint paths and was originally proposed in (Seo and Feng, 1995). Therefore, the basic building blocks in the ACBN are 4/spl times/4 SEs with log/sub 2/N stages. The ACBN inherits the favorable features of the CBN such as regularity, symmetry and easy rerouting capability under faults and conflicts. The ACBN also has an efficient and fast control algorithm that can easily generate a primary routing tag and alternative routing tags as in the CBN. A major improvement of the ACBN over the CBN is the higher connectivity with four disjoint paths between any source and destination pair. Moreover the ACBN can generate alternative routing tags in a much simpler way i.e., by a simple binary operation not by the conversion table as in the CBN. To compare the ACBN with other networks in connectivity, we introduce the definition of a degree of connectivity as a new connectivity measure function. The comparison results show that due to high connectivity the ACBN can resolve more random connection requests than other networks by using only a small amount of additional hardware.
A generic data driven approach for Medicaid fraud detection

Utilizing data mining techniques to detect health care fraud has helped detect fraud patterns by providers and reduce the amount of waste spent and abuse in the health care system. However, less attention has been paid on Medicaid eligibility frauds by applicants in the health care system. In this paper, we explore fraud detection using a data driven approach at the time of eligibility application process. Identifying fraud at the beginning phase reduces the number of fraud abusers in the system and allow for future monitoring for such similar activities. We propose a generic data driven approach, which utilizes major public and private databases for detecting fraud and inaccurate eligibility requirements.
Different V˙O2max Time-Averaging Intervals in Swimming

Abstract We aimed to determine the effect of sampling interval strategy on V˙O2max assessment to establish a standard time averaging method that allows a better identification of the V˙O2 plateau incidence in swimming. To this end, 3 incremental protocols utilizing different step lengths for each sampling interval were used to compare V˙O2max measurements. 11 trained male swimmers performed 3 repetitions of a front crawl intermittent incremental protocol until exhaustion (increments of 0.05 m.s − 1, with 30 s and 24–48 h intervals between steps and tests, respectively) with 200, 300 and 400-m step lengths. V˙O2 was directly measured, and 6 sampling intervals were compared: bxb and averages of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 s. Shorter sampling intervals (≤15 s) allowed the highest incidence of the V˙O2 plateau, independent of the step lengths used; the 200 and 300-m step protocols accounted for higher percentage of V˙O2 plateau incidence, and higher V˙O2max values, compared to the 400-m step protocol. As an optimal sampling interval should be used for the validation of the research findings, and considering that swimmers and coaches prefer less time-consuming protocols, the use of the 10 s time-average interval (once bxb and 5 s samplings present high variability) in a 200-m step incremental protocol for V˙O2max assessment in swimming is suggested.
Effectiveness and efficiency of root cause analysis in medicine.

PREVENTABLE MISTAKES ARE COMMON IN MEDICINE. FOR example, at 1 hospital, a patient received patientcontrolled analgesia (PCA), a combination of local anesthetic and narcotic. The medication was intended to be infused into the epidural space. Instead, a nurse inadvertently connected the tubing to an intravenous catheter, delivering potentially lethal anesthetic into the patient’s bloodstream. What followed were the nurse’s anguish and guilt and, almost as inevitably, the hospital’s root cause analysis (RCA). In the last decade, this process has become the main way medicine investigates mistakes and tries to prevent future mistakes. But like many innovations in medicine, RCA has never been evaluated for effectiveness. In the case mentioned above, the team identified flaws in the design of the epidural catheter, but thought that fixing those flaws was beyond their scope. Therefore, they made a recommendation they could implement: reeducating staff about the equipment’s use. In the end, despite a significant investment of resources, this solution did not remove the underlying hazard and had little effect outside the institution. No one had confidence that things were safer. Indeed, since 1999, the US Pharmacopeia has received 1600 reports of epidural-to-intravenous misconnection (MEDMARX data in file, USP 2007). Many of these incidents undoubtedly received their own RCAs, but the mistake continues to occur. Root cause analysis was originally developed in psychology and systems engineering to identify “the basic and causal factor(s) that underlie variation in performance. ” It provides structure to the retrospective analysis of errors and has been used successfully for decades to uncover latent errors in high reliability organizations, such as aviation and nuclear power. Root cause analysis is now a familiar tool for hospitals and health care organizations and has helped to identify many problems and solutions. The RCA process is designed to answer 3 basic questions: what happened, why did it happen, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again? What is missing in medicine is a fourth question: has the risk of recurrence actually been reduced? The fact that it generally is not known whether risk has been reduced is causing concern that some of the considerable resources and efforts expended on RCA are being wasted.
Objective audible clicking in ear; presentation.

Tinnitus aurium is a clinical entity that is quite prevalent. A simple definition of tinnitus is noise in the head. It may be transitory or constant, rhythmic or irregular, soft, medium loud, or loud. It may or may not be synchronous with the pulse rate. It may be totally involuntary or it may be partly or wholly controlled under certain conditions. The noise may be a hum, a click, a tick, or soft blowing in character. Usually it is audible only to the patient, in which case it is termed subjective tinnitus. However, in rare instances, the head noise is audible to the examiner as well. In this case, it is described as objective. Certain cephalic murmurs, caused by an arterial aneurysm or an engorged cranial vessel, can be heard by means of the stethoscope. This type of cephalic auscultation was formerly practiced extensively, but now it is rarely resorted
Making Sense of Product Requirements

This paper takes a historical perspective to more than 40 years of software development within a company that is delivering its products to a diverse set of customers throughout the world. By examining the company’s past, we wish to find origins and potential remedies for the challenges that many companies presently face in determining just which, of many, features shall be implemented to forthcoming versions of their software products. We have concluded that the product-related design problems that once were manageable with rational thinking have gradually evolved into problems that have multiple and conflicting interpretations, different value orientations, unclear goals, contradictions and paradoxes. These problems occur due to the demands imposed by larger and much more diverse sets of critical stakeholders drawn from the new global business environment with its multi-cultural needs and greater numbers of highly domain-skilled, computer naïve users. For such problems sense making rather than decision making has begun to be the central organizational issue.
Effect of innominate and femoral varus derotation osteotomy on acetabular development in developmental dysplasia of the hip.

BACKGROUND Open reduction for the treatment of hip dislocation due to developmental dysplasia of the hip in children of walking age is frequently combined with either a femoral varus derotation osteotomy or an innominate osteotomy; however, it remains unclear which of these procedures is preferable in terms of subsequent hip development. The purpose of the present study was to compare acetabular development in patients managed for dislocation of the hip with open reduction combined with one of the two osteotomies. METHODS Patients between fifteen months and four years of age with hip dislocations that were treated at two different centers were compared. At one center, open reduction combined with a femoral varus derotation osteotomy was performed (thirty-eight patients), and at the other, open reduction combined with an innominate osteotomy was performed (thirty-three patients). In each group, one surgeon performed all of the operations. A total of 490 postoperative radiographs that were made over a mean follow-up period of 6.2 years were analyzed. We compared the change in acetabular index as well as several other radiographic criteria of acetabular development and hip stability over time. RESULTS After osteotomy, the acetabular index improved in both groups; however, the acetabular index in patients who underwent a varus derotation osteotomy never improved as much as that in patients who underwent an innominate osteotomy, with a mean difference of 9.5 after four years (p < 0.0001). Similarly, the innominate osteotomy group demonstrated better acetabular architecture and hip stability over time as quantified by the change in the acetabular floor thickness (p = 0.03), lateral centering ratio (p < 0.0001), and superior centering ratio (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS In the present series, acetabular remodeling after open hip reduction and innominate osteotomy was more effective for reversing acetabular dysplasia and maintaining hip stability than open reduction combined with a femoral varus derotation osteotomy was. Long-term follow-up is necessary to determine whether the more favorable hip development following innominate osteotomy is associated with a lower incidence of premature degenerative hip disease.
Some observations on linkage effects in genetic recombination in Escherichia coli K-12.

SUMMARY: Further recombination data have been obtained from matings involving different F+ auxotrophic mutants of Escherichia coli strain K-12 with the same K-12 F- auxotroph. Variations in the distribution of sugar fermentation markers among the progeny have been explained by the influence of the ‘contra-selected’ F+ auxotrophic marker. It is suggested that the data supports the conception of a single linear chromosome in K-12, which fragments randomly during recombination.
Cytoarchitectonic identification and probabilistic mapping of two distinct areas within the anterior ventral bank of the human intraparietal sulcus

Anatomical studies in the macaque cortex and functional imaging studies in humans have demonstrated the existence of different cortical areas within the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Such functional segregation, however, does not correlate with presently available architectonic maps of the human brain. This is particularly true for the classical Brodmann map, which is still widely used as an anatomical reference in functional imaging studies. The aim of this cytoarchitectonic mapping study was to use previously defined algorithms to determine whether consistent regions and borders can be found within the cortex of the anterior IPS in a population of 10 post‐mortem human brains. Two areas, the human intraparietal area 1 (hIP1) and the human intraparietal area 2 (hIP2), were delineated in serial histological sections of the anterior, lateral bank of the human IPS. The region hIP1 is located posterior and medial to hIP2, and the former is always within the depths of the IPS. The latter, on the other hand, sometimes reaches the free surface of the superior parietal lobule. The delineations were registered to standard reference space, and probabilistic maps were calculated, thereby quantifying the intersubject variability in location and extent of both areas. In the future, they can be a tool for analyzing structure–function relationships and a basis for determining degrees of homology in the IPS among anthropoid primates. We conclude that the human IPS has a more finely grained parcellation than shown in Brodmann's map. J. Comp. Neurol. 495:53–69, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Exposition aux moisissures en environnement intérieur : méthodes de mesure et impacts sur la santé

Les moisissures sont des micro-organismes presents dans tous les environnements interieurs. Les effets sur la sante associes a ces champignons microscopiques sont multiples : irritations, reactions immunoallergiques, infections et effets toxiques. Selon le niveau d’exposition et la vulnerabilite des populations, les moisissures peuvent representer des risques plus ou moins importants pour la sante publique. Les logements humides et moisis ont par exemple ete associes a des maladies chroniques respiratoires telles que l’asthme et les rhinites allergiques. Cependant, le manque d’outils valides permettant d’evaluer quantitativement l’exposition fongique environnementale constitue une des principales difficultes pour mieux apprehender le role des particules et des composes fongiques sur la sante humaine. Lors de ce travail de these, diverses techniques d’echantillonnage et methodes d’analyses ont ete evaluees afin de mesurer la contamination fongique de l’air, des surfaces et des poussieres. Un indice moleculaire base sur la technique de PCR quantitative a notamment ete teste et compare a d’autres approches pour mesurer l’exposition fongique dans des logements. Apres analyse des poussieres domestiques collectees au sol, cet indice a permis de discriminer les habitats avec ou sans moisissures visibles. La quantification de groupes fongiques par PCR quantitative s’avere une technique prometteuse pour la mesure de l’exposition aux moisissures dans les environnements interieurs. Outre le developpement et la validation d’outils de mesure, une demarche globale de prevention du risque fongique semble necessaire, particulierement chez les populations vulnerables.
Brightness and color correction for dual camera image registration

Asymmetric dual camera system needs a preprocessing for registration in two input images due to the difference of brightness and color information. To solve this problem, this paper presents a framework that corrects the brightness and color between two input images. The proposed framework consists of three steps : i) selection of the reference and source images based on the contrast, ii) brightness enhancement using the brightness compensation map to minimize the difference of average brightness level of two input images, and iii) color correction of source image using color information of the reference image to compensate the disparity based on the illumination condition and exposure parameters. Experimental results show that proposed brightness and color correction method improves the performance of image registration in an asymmetric dual camera system.
Daptomycin Dose-Effect Relationship against Resistant Gram-Positive Organisms

ABSTRACT Daptomycin exhibits in vitro bactericidal activity against clinically significant gram-positive bacteria. We employed pharmacodynamic modeling to determine a once-daily dosing regimen of daptomycin that correlates to pharmacodynamic endpoints for different resistant gram-positive clinical strains. An in vitro pharmacodynamic model with an initial inoculum of 6 log10 CFU/ml was used to simulate daptomycin regimens ranging in dose from 0 to 9 mg/kg of body weight/day, with corresponding exposures reflecting free-daptomycin concentrations in serum. Bacterial density was profiled over 48 h for two methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA-67 and -R515), two glycopeptide intermediate-resistant S. aureus (GISA-992 and -147398), and two vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREF-12366 and -SF12047) strains. A sigmoid dose-response model was used to estimate the effective dose required to achieve 50% (ED50) and 80% (ED80) bacterial density reduction at 48 h. Daptomycin MICs for study isolates ranged from 0.125 to 4 μg/ml. Model fitting resulted in an r2 of >0.80 for all tested isolates. Control growths at 48 h ranged from 7.3 to 8.5 log10 CFU/ml. Sigmoid relationships were not superimposable between categorical resistant species: ED50 and ED80 values were 1.9 and 3.1, 4.2 and 5.6, and 5.4 and 6.8 mg/kg for MRSA, GISA, and VREF isolates, respectively. Doses required to achieve ED50 and ED80 values correlated with MIC differences between tested organisms. Corresponding area under the concentration-time curve from 0 to 24 h/MIC exposure ratios demonstrated a wide range of ED80 values among the tested isolates. Doses ranging between 3 and 7 mg/kg produced significant bactericidal activity (ED80) against these multidrug-resistant S. aureus and E. faecium isolates.
La cobertura corporativa del riesgo de cambio en las empresas no financieras espa¤olas

El objeto del presente trabajo es estudiar los factores determinantes de la decisi¢n de algunas empresas no financieras espa¤olas de dise¤ar e implantar estrategias de cobertura del riesgo de cambio. Los factores que se analizan en este estudio son el nivel de exposici¢n econ¢mica al riesgo de cambio de la empresa, sus problemas financieros y de agencia y la existencia de economias de escala informativas y transaccionales en el uso de derivados financieros para la cobertura del riesgo de cambio. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que la probabilidad de que las empresas dise¤en e implanten estrategias de cobertura del riesgo de cambio fue mayor en los a¤os m s recientes, siendo las empresas m s endeudadas y de mayor tama¤o las que cubren en mayor medida el riesgo de cambio.
On the transcendence degree of subfields of division algebras

Abstract We study subfields of quotient division algebras of domains of finite GK dimension and introduce a combinatorial property we call the straightening property. We show that many classes of algebras have this straightening property and show that if A is a domain of GK dimension d with this property that is not PI, then the maximal subfields of the quotient division algebra of A have transcendence degree at most d− 1, proving a special case of a conjecture of Small.