Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel Variant in the ANK 2 Membrane-Binding Domain Is Associated With Ankyrin-B Syndrome and Structural Heart Disease in a First Nations Population With a High Rate of Long QT Syndrome

A prolonged QT interval on ECG, corrected for heart rate (QTc), is a marker for increased risk for arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death and may be a result of genetic and/ or nongenetic factors. Congenital long QT syndrome (LQTS types 1–13) is caused by variants in at least 13 known genes that encode for or affect the stability of critical ion channel proteins. LQTS is characterized by a QTc >450 ms for men and >460 ms for women and can be associated with ventricular arrhythmia, syncope, and seizures. Notably, sudden death can be the first manifestation. Certain LQTS-associated variants also contribute to broader phenotypes, such as heart failure, cardiomyopathy, congenital structural heart disease, and non-LQTS arrhythmia. Although relatively rare (1:2000 people world-wide), LQTS is at least 15 times more common (≈1:125) in the Gitxsan First Nation, a remote community in Background—Long QT syndrome confers susceptibility to ventricular arrhythmia, predisposing to syncope, seizures, and sudden death. While rare globally, long QT syndrome is ≈15× more common in First Nations of Northern British Columbia largely because of a known mutation in KCNQ1. However, 2 large multigenerational families were affected, but negative for the known mutation. Methods and Results—Long QT syndrome panel testing was carried out in the index case of each family, and clinical information was collected. Cascade genotyping was performed. Biochemical and myocyte-based assays were performed to evaluate the identified gene variant for loss-of-function activity. Index cases in these 2 families harbored a novel ANK2 c.1937C>T variant (p.S646F). An additional 16 carriers were identified, including 2 with structural heart disease: one with cardiomyopathy resulting in sudden death and the other with congenital heart disease. For all carriers of this variant, the average QTc was 475 ms (±40). Although ankyrin-B p.S646F is appropriately folded and expressed in bacteria, the mutant polypeptide displays reduced expression in cultured H9c2 cells and aberrant localization in primary cardiomyocytes. Furthermore, myocytes expressing ankyrin-B p.S646F lack normal membrane targeting of the ankyrinbinding partner, the Na/Ca exchanger. Thus, ankyrin-B p.S646F is a loss-of-function variant. Conclusions—We identify the first disease-causing ANK2 variant localized to the membrane-binding domain resulting in reduced ankyrin-B expression and abnormal localization. Further study is warranted on the potential association of this variant with structural heart disease given the role of ANK2 in targeting and stabilization of key structural and signaling molecules in cardiac cells. (Circ Cardiovasc Genet. 2017;10:e001537. DOI: 10.1161/ CIRCGENETICS.116.001537.)
Heat Stress in Livestock: Impacts and Ameliorative Strategies—a Review

Heat stress is one of the most important climatic conditions which adversely affects agricultural and livestock production worldwide. High ambient temperature with direct and indirect solar radiation, wind speed and relative humidity impose thermal stress in animals. The foremost reaction of animals under thermal weather is increased respiration and pulse rate, and rectal temperature. It directly affects feed intake thereby, reduces growth rate, milk yield, reproductive performance and even death in extreme cases. Heat stress suppresses the immune system thereby enhances susceptibility of an animal to various diseases. It is very important to control the impacts of thermal stress for sustainable dairy farming. Advances in environmental modifications and nutritional management in part alleviate the impact of thermal stress on animal performance during the hotter seasons. However, long-term strategies have to be evolved for adaptation to climate change. Differences in thermal tolerance between livestock species provide clues to select thermotolerant animals using genetic tools. There are heat shock gene related to thermotolerance that was identified and being used as marker in marker-assisted selection and genome-wide selection to develop thermotolerant bull that is used in breeding program. The present review collates and synthesizes information pertaining to thermal shock and possible ameliorative strategies to combat the impacts in livestock.
Analytical performance characteristics should be judged against objective quality specifications.

The discipline of clinical chemistry is dynamic. Even a superficial glance at contents pages of the Journal over recent years demonstrates a marked evolution of the field. Appropriately, the Information for authors has also changed over the years to reflect new concepts of what constitutes an acceptable publication. Readers of the Journal may have noticed an addition to the 1999 Information for authors (1), under the heading Description of Analytical Methods and Results , namely: “ Analytical quality. Results obtained for the performance characteristics should be compared objectively to well-documented quality specifications, e.g., published data on the state of the art, performance required by regulatory bodies such as CLIA ‘88, or recommendations documented by expert professional groups”. In addition, quality specifications can be derived from analysis of performance on clinical decision-making. Many manuscripts deal with the development of new analytical methods or evaluation of commercially available analytical systems. Experimental designs and statistical techniques used to derive data on imprecision and bias are generally more than satisfactory. This is hardly surprising in view of the very many published protocols for the evaluation of methods (2). In contrast, objective analysis of whether the imprecision and bias are satisfactory is often less well done. This is not a new phenomenon. Although the idea of utilizing quality specifications in assessing the acceptability of method performance was firmly stated in 1974 (3), it was pointed out more than a decade ago that few evaluators actually did compare the performance achieved with preset quality specifications (4)(5). This seems rather difficult to understand because quality specifications based on the state of the art (6), the views of an expert individual (7), and biological variation (8) had been available for many years. Indeed, even a superficial reading of the more recent literature would demonstrate that many …
Metabolic and Non-Metabolic Uptake of Sodium in Roots of Zea Mays.

It has been recognized for many years that part of the ions that enter plant tissue bathed in a salt solution are not irreversibly sequestered but enter and are free to leave again in accordance with Fick's law of diffusion and principles pertaining to Donnan or ionic exchange equilibria (8,9, 13, 16). This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the non-metabolic diffusive movement of salt into a part of the tissue (the free space) which presents little if any resistance to the entry of dissolved materials. Some importance has been attached to the measurement of free space in terms of the relative volume of tissue involved. The difficulties inherent in such measurements have been discussed thoroughly by Briggs and Robertson (3) and need not be considered here. In this article the authors have followed Jacobson et al (13) and have sought to avoid questions of volume and space by using the term "non-metabolic uptake". Arbitrarily we have included under this heading ion uptake at low temperatures, in an atmosphere of N2, or in the presence of metabolic inhibitors. Studies of non-metabolic absorption have been carried out with tissue slices and whole roots (16). Most of the tissue comprising these materials consists of mature cells since even where whole roots are used the meristematic portion amounts to only a small fraction of the sample taken. Over and above their capacity for non-metabolic uptake of salt such tissues exhibit a pronounced ability to absorb ions metabolically by a process that is relatively irreversible. This phenomenon makes necessary the postulation of a barrier either within the cell or at its surface which is impermeable to ions in the medium. According to some evidence (1), the barrier is perhaps the tonoplast, the vacuoles representing a sink or dead end in which ions are trapped as they move through the symplast. The possibility is not ruled out that the plasmalemma may represent the barrier, but if this were the case, it would become necessary to limit non-metabolic uptake of ions to the cell walls and the intercellular spaces (16,17). Yet a third conception is that the whole cytoplasm constitutes a barrier,
Piaget on Moral Development.

When confronted with a group of parents who asked me “How can we help make our children virtuous? ” I had to answer as Socrates, “You must think I am very fortunate to know how virtue is acquired. The fact is that far from knowing whether it can be taught, I have no idea what virtue really is”. It appears, then, that we must either be totally silent about moral education or else speak to the nature of virtue.
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature–Society Relations Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction: Becky Mansfield. 1. The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession, Commodification and Life Patents in Canada (Scott Prudham). 2. The 'Commons' Versus the 'Commodity': Alter-globalization, Anti-privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South (Karen Bakker). 3. The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance (Julie Guthman). 4. Property, Markets, and Dispossession: The Western Alaska Community Development Quota as Neoliberalism, Social Justice, Both, and Neither (Becky Mansfield). 5. Discovering Price in All the Wrong Places: The Work of Commodity Definition and Price under Neoliberal Environmental Policy (Morgan Robertson). 6. The Difference that Class Makes: Neoliberalization and Non-Capitalism in the Fishing Industry of New England (Kevin St Martin). 7. Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many-Splendored Thing (Wendy Wolford). Index.
An Evaluation of the Effect of Public Support in Enhancing Occupational Incorporation of Former Soviet Union Immigrants to Israel: A Longitudinal Study

Does governmental intervention in the form of occupational training and retraining and other forms of assistance improve immigrants' occupational opportunities both as self-employed and as salaried employees? These have been longstanding research and government concerns in societies that face large waves of immigration. This study reports on the research findings of a longitudinal study which sought to examine the effects of governmental support mechanisms on the incorporation of a large immigrant inflow from the former Soviet Union (FSU) high in human capital into the labour market. Three types of public support programmes were investigated: occupational retraining, subsidised salaries for immigrants and support for immigrants in business creation. The research population consisted of 910 new immigrants from the FSU who arrived to Israel in the 1990s; they were interviewed in-depth in 1992 and again in 1994/5. The findings show that the three support mechanisms differ in their contribution to the transferability of human capital of immigrants and their earnings from jobs. They also affect men and women immigrants differently. The question ‘what worked? ’ is discussed from three viewpoints: accountability of public programmes, knowledge basis and implementation. A training system approach is used to explain differences in the effects of the three policy instruments on the occupational incorporation of the immigrants.
Interactions in the microbiome: communities of organisms and communities of genes

A central challenge in microbial community ecology is the delineation of appropriate units of biodiversity, which can be taxonomic, phylogenetic, or functional in nature. The term ‘community’ is applied ambiguously; in some cases, the term refers simply to a set of observed entities, while in other cases, it requires that these entities interact with one another. Microorganisms can rapidly gain and lose genes, potentially decoupling community roles from taxonomic and phylogenetic groupings. Trait-based approaches offer a useful alternative, but many traits can be defined based on gene functions, metabolic modules, and genomic properties, and the optimal set of traits to choose is often not obvious. An analysis that considers taxon assignment and traits in concert may be ideal, with the strengths of each approach offsetting the weaknesses of the other. Individual genes also merit consideration as entities in an ecological analysis, with characteristics such as diversity, turnover, and interactions modeled using genes rather than organisms as entities. We identify some promising avenues of research that are likely to yield a deeper understanding of microbial communities that shift from observation-based questions of ‘Who is there? ’ and ‘What are they doing? ’ to the mechanistically driven question of ‘How will they respond? ’
Video Super-Resolution via Convolution Neural Network

Nowadays, people might need super resolution to obtain high quality images. Super resolution algorithm enhances high frequency information (texture or edges) to improve the image quality. We can do more things with super resolution, such as road surveillance system. The image quality would be degraded by illumination, angle, distance, and other conditions, and it will result in failing to recognize license plate or human face. Interpolation is a traditional method for super resolution, but this method does not ignore high frequency information. Therefore, example-based super-resolution methods were proposed. Besides, deep learning has great performance in many applications. However, for super-resolution, the computational complexity via deep learning algorithm is high and it needs some time to generate a high-resolution image. The time might be acceptable for single image. But what if we have to enhance video, it will take a lot of time to rebuild. Therefore, our research aims to solve this problem. We present a faster super resolution for video based on deep learning. We find the different patches between frame and frame. Add these patches into neural net and rebuild high resolution image to lower the total compute time.
Earnings and Employment Trends in the 1990s.

Earnings have long been considered an important measure of one’s economic well-being, and it is widely accepted that increased earnings over time result in improved living standards. In the United States, real earnings rose sharply for several decades after World War II, but the trend slowed abruptly during the 1970s. Although the picture during the 1980s and much of the 1990s is less clear because of different patterns among the major earnings measures, it is safe to say that there was comparatively little real wage growth during that period. In recent years, however, workers’ real earnings have been on the rise. The stagnation in real earnings for much of the 1990s stands in marked contrast to the considerable growth in employment during that decade. As of December 1999, the end of the period examined in this article, the current economic expansion had lasted almost 9 years. During that period, total employment, as measured by the Current Population Survey (CPS), grew by more than 161⁄2 million. Previous research, using data from the CPS, showed that employment growth during the first half of the 1990s was concentrated in both relatively higher paying and relatively lower paying job categories, with a decline in the number of jobs paying midlevel wages. That same research supported the notion that there was a trend toward “polarization” in employment growth. However, it did not examine the earnings trends in the fields associated with those categories, nor did it address whether the marked employment growth in some of the categories was accompanied by wage gains. The analysis presented herein extends the earlier work by examining the changes in both employment and earnings for all wage and salary workers over the 1989–99 period. Specifically, the analysis addresses the following questions: What has been the relationship between the change in employment and the change in real median weekly earnings? In particular, how have earnings changed in those job categories that posted the largest increases in employment? In addition, what happened to earnings dispersion during the 1990s, especially within the high-, middle-, and low-paying job categories? The findings presented in the sections that follow suggest that the marked growth in wage and salary employment that took place from 1989 to 1999 in the highest and lowest earnings groups was not accompanied by a rapid rise in earnings. Earnings indeed rose, but only modestly, for both groups. In contrast, both employment and wages in the middle earnings group changed relatively little over the period. While some specific occupation-industry categories posted both strong employment and earnings growth, no significant correlation between employment and earnings changes was uncovered for the three major earnings groups. Finally, despite the polarization found in employment growth, earnings dispersion showed little change over the 1989–99 period. Earnings and employment trends in the 1990s
Microoxen: microorganisms to move microscale loads.

It is difficult to harness the power generated by biological motors to carry out mechanical work in systems outside the cell. Efforts to capture the mechanical energy of nanomotors ex vivo require in vitro reconstitution of motor proteins and, often, protein engineering. This study presents a method for harnessing the power produced by biological motors that uses intact cells. The unicellular, biflagellated algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii serve as "microoxen. " This method uses surface chemistry to attach loads (1- to 6-microm-diameter polystyrene beads) to cells, phototaxis to steer swimming cells, and photochemistry to release loads. These motile microorganisms can transport microscale loads (3-microm-diameter beads) at velocities of approximately 100-200 microm.sec(-1) and over distances as large as 20 cm.
Adapting to new challenges: IDSS for emergency preparedness and management

In order to manage risks, emergency planning and preparedness procedures are currently in use. The advent of Information Technology (IT) in the field of emergency management opened vast possibilities for the development of Integrated Decision Support Systems (IDSS). They are designed to perform calculations, make risk representation, fully interact with stakeholders, and assist in communicating operational tasks to emergency command people. The present work introduces IDSS computer software, i.e. KOVERS, designed and implemented to assist emergency management in the case of potential nuclear and chemical accidents involving fixed installations or transportation activities. This package addresses the specific needs of industrial customers as well as military and civil defence specialists, who are interested in running compact codes on general use and portable machines such as notebooks, and make ad hoc informed decisions on the accident field. KOVERS has a number of special features that may single it out as in applicability and computational complexity: it handles a comprehensive GIS environment (24 layers of distinct information) with reference to Switzerland; it introduces an original model to perform sophisticated calculations for air dispersion in complex terrain; assists in making special calculations and creates maps to identify areas that lack HF radio communication coverage in a complex terrain under emergency; calculates consequences due to dispersion of radio-nuclides and chemicals into water bodies e.g. rivers and lakes as well as the contamination of the ground water; calculates consequences of BLEVE, explosions, tunnel fires etc. KOVERS is open to extension by estimating and representing with a high degree of precision, the potential consequences due to accidental satellite re-entering, calculating the possible area of impact and associated consequences, e.g. population affected, ecological losses. KOVERS is characterised as a compact, efficient computer tool with a high degree of integration of existing commercial maps e.g. Swiss Map 100, orthographic pictures, satellite images, into a computational environment of an intended "user-friendly high complexity". Examples of KOVERS runs are included. The paper aims at clarifying the role and the potential use of IDSS into risk dialogue activities by means of stakeholder interaction processes.
Recognition of logical units in log files

With the development of new technologies more and more information is stored in log files. Analyzing such logs can be very useful for the decision maker. One of the probably best known example is the Web log file analysis where lots of efficient tools have been proposed to extract the top-k accessed pages, the best users or even the patterns describing the behaviors of users on a Web site. These tools take advantages of the well-formed structures of the data. Unfortunately, logs files from the industrial world have very heterogeneous complex structures e.g., tables, lists, data blocks. For experts, analyzing logs to find messages helping to better understand causes of a failure, if a problem have already occurred in the past or even knowing the main consequences of a failure is a hard, tedious, time-consuming and error-prone task. There is thus a need for new tools helping the experts to easily recognize the appropriate part in logs. Passage retrieval methods have proved to be very useful for extracting relevant parts in documents. In this paper we propose a new approach for automatically split logs files into relevant segments based on their logical units. We characterize the complex logical units found in logs according to their syntactic characteristics. We also introduce the notion of generalized vs-grams which is used to automatically extract the syntactic characteristics of special structures found in log files. Conducted experiments are performed on real datasets from the industrial world to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposal on the recognition of complex logical units.