Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient Delivery and Functional Expression of Transfected Modified mRNA in Human Embryonic Stem Cell-derived Retinal Pigmented Epithelial Cells

Background: In vitro-produced retinal pigmented epithelial (RPE) cells represent a novel source for retinal degenerative disease healing. Results: mRNA transfection outperformed plasmid transfection in cellular uptake. Modified-mRNA displayed negligible immune activation and functional protein expression. Conclusion: Modified mRNA transfection can be used efficiently for the engineering of RPE cells. Significance: The modified mRNA transfection technique offers new venues for the treatment of RPE-related diseases. Gene- and cell-based therapies are promising strategies for the treatment of degenerative retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, Stargardt disease, and retinitis pigmentosa. Cellular engineering before transplantation may allow the delivery of cellular factors that can promote functional improvements, such as increased engraftment or survival of transplanted cells. A current challenge in traditional DNA-based vector transfection is to find a delivery system that is both safe and efficient, but using mRNA as an alternative to DNA can circumvent these major roadblocks. In this study, we show that both unmodified and modified mRNA can be delivered to retinal pigmented epithelial (RPE) cells with a high efficiency compared with conventional plasmid delivery systems. On the other hand, administration of unmodified mRNA induced a strong innate immune response that was almost absent when using modified mRNA. Importantly, transfection of mRNA encoding a key regulator of RPE gene expression, microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF), confirmed the functionality of the delivered mRNA. Immunostaining showed that transfection with either type of mRNA led to the expression of roughly equal levels of MITF, primarily localized in the nucleus. Despite these findings, quantitative RT-PCR analyses showed that the activation of the expression of MITF target genes was higher following transfection with modified mRNA compared with unmodified mRNA. Our findings, therefore, show that modified mRNA transfection can be applied to human embryonic stem cell-derived RPE cells and that the method is safe, efficient, and functional.
The effects of recreational dance interventions on the health and well-being of children and young people: A systematic review

Aim: To explore the effects of participating in recreational dance on the physical health and psychosocial outcomes of children and adolescents. Method: A systematic review of controlled studies of recreational dance activity involving 5–21-year-olds. Results: Fourteen studies were included in the review covering a wide range of dance styles, population groups and settings. Results point to a consistency of association across a range of different populations and settings that suggest that recreational dance can improve cardiovascular fitness and bone health of children and young people and can contribute to preventing or reducing obesity. There is also more limited evidence that suggests dance participation may improve self-concept and body image and reduce anxiety. Conclusions: There is some evidence to suggest that involvement in dance may have some positive outcomes on physical and psychosocial well-being. Further high-quality research is recommended.
Children's Health Article Materials and Methods Blood Lead Secular Trend in a Cohort of Children in Mexico City (1987–2002)

Population lead exposure has been one of the main environmental health problems in Several standards have been published in the last decade to restrict emissions and reduce the exposure to this metal. Lead in gasoline, one of the main sources of environmental exposure eliminated in the past decade, was reduced by > 98.5% between 1986 and 1997. In September 1997 it was eliminated from all gasoline sold in the metropolitan zone of the Valley of Mexico. Thanks to the elimination of this source, from 1988 to 2002 the mean lead air level was reduced from 2.80 µg/m 3 to 0.07 µg/m 3 Notwithstanding the success in reducing air lead, there are still other sources of population exposure, such as fixed industrial sources that contaminate restricted zones in their surroundings and lead-glazed ceramics that affect most of the population (Hernandez-Avila et al. The results of several cross-sectional studies from the population in Mexico City performed during the last decade reveal a reduction in blood lead levels, an indicator of environmental lead exposure. However, these data do not allow evaluation of the effect of the reduction of environmental exposure across time. For this reason, our objective in this work was to determine the secular trend in blood lead concentrations of a cohort of children evaluated every 6 months during their first 10 years of life. We also quantified the relative contribution of several other sources of exposure to this metal to their blood lead levels. Nevertheless, because of the difficulty in specifying and measuring the different lead sources, the data of this study can only provide the lower limit of the contribution of each source. Subjects. We recruited 502 pregnant women attending the prenatal clinic at 12 weeks of pregnancy at the National Institute of Perinatology in Mexico City. They all signed an informed consent form approved by the ethics committee of the institute. Only 383 of the children born to these women fulfilled the inclusion criteria: 5-min Apgar score ≥ 7, birth weight > 2,000 g, gestation age ≥ 36 weeks, without major or minor congenital anomalies or being the product of multiple birth. Of these children, 62 were lost to follow-up between 1 and 6 months after birth. We followed 321 children, born between 1987 and 1992, through structured interviews of the parents and with psychometric tests and blood lead determinations every 6 months from delivery. Table 1 presents the …
Cohomological and K -theoretic Invariants of Singularity Loci

This thesis is devoted to the study of singularities of holomorphic maps: their geometry, as well as cohomological and K-theoretic invariants, their properties and computational strategies. One of the main problems in global singularity theory is how to compute Thom polynomials. I show how the two modern methods of computation can be combined in a different computational approach and give examples of computation. A recent development in global singularity theory is the introduction of the K-theoretic invariants of singularity loci. One can define a K-theoretic invariant of an affine variety in two different ways. I prove that even for A2 singularity loci, in the general case, the two invariants are different, and therefore, the A2-loci may have singularities worse than rational. However, in the case of relative codimension 0, the two invariants coincide, and thus the A2-loci have rational singularities. KOLOKOLNIKOVA, Natalia. Cohomological and K-theoretic invariants of singularity loci. Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2018, no. Sc. 5244 DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:107242 URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-1072428
La volonté de savoir

Table of content . 1 About the content . 1 Is part of . 1 Editions of this work . 1 livres (5) . 2 Documents about this work . 2 Documents about the work La volonté de savoir (1976) / Michel Foucault (1926-1984) . 2 Pages in data.bnf. fr . 2 Related authors . 2 This page in data.bnf. fr lab . 2 Sources and references . 2 Link to the main catalogue . 2 Sources
Longman English Grammar Practice. For intermediate students.

The sentence nouns articles pronouns quantity adjectives adverbs prepositions, adverb particles and phrasal verbs verbs, verb tenses, imperatives be, have, do modal auxilaries and related verbs the passive and the causative questions, answers, negatives conditional sentences direct and indirect speech the infinitive and the "-ing" form.
On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle pointed out that some activities are engaged in for their own sake, while others are directed at some end. The test for distinguishing between them is to ask, ‘At any time during a period in which someone is Xing, is it also true that they have Xed? ’ If both are true, the activity is being done for its own sake. If not, it is being done for the sake of some end other than itself. For example, if I am thinking, it is true that I have thought. But if I’m making a blouse, it is not true that I have made a blouse, at least not this particular blouse. That’s not true until I have completed the project. There have been a number of attempts to deepen our understanding of this distinction. Anthony Kenny devoted a chapter of Action, Emotion, and Will to this issue, exploring the effect tense has on implication relations, and using that as a basis for dividing verbs of action into state-verbs, activity-verbs and performance-verbs. In more recent years the trend has been to generalize these categories so as to include occurrences other than actions, i.e., occurrences which do not involve intentions. While interest in this area tends to focus primarily on linguistic issues, such as the categorization of verbs, or on the logical analysis of sentences, there has been some interest in related metaphysical issues. In 1978 Alexander Mourelatos published ‘Events, Processes, and States,’ a paper which has turned out to be quite influential, in which he proposes an ontological trichotomy of occurrences. In his view, processes and events form distinct categories within the general category of occurrences. In this paper I will examine the reasoning underlying Mourelatos’s claim, arguing that the differences between processes and events cannot provide the basis for an ontological subcategorization of occurrences.
Investigation of electron acceleration and deceleration in plasmas

xv Zusammenfassung xvii 1 Concept of Wakefield Acceleration in Plasmas 1 1.1 Wakefield Generation . 2 1.1.1 Excitation of a Plasma Wave in Cold Plasma by a Relativistic Electron Beam in Linear Regime . 4 1.1.2 Laser-Driven Wakefield in Linear Regime . 6 1.1.3 Laser-Driven Wakefield in 1D Non-linear Regime . 8 1.1.4 Bubble Regime . 9 1.2 Electron Injection . 12 1.2.1 Wave breaking and Self-injection . 14 1.2.2 Density Transition and Shock-front Injection . 15 1.3 Laser Dynamics in Plasma . 16 1.3. 1 Self-focusing of Laser Pulse in Plasma . 16 1.3. 2 Self-modulation and Pulse Shortening . 19 1.4 Limitation of Wakefield Acceleration . 20 1.4. 1 Hosing Instability . 20 1.4. 2 Beam Loading . 21 1.4. 3 Limitation of LWFA and the Scaling Rules . 21 1.4. 4 Limitation of PWFA . 24 1.5 Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation . 24 2 The Physics of Propagation of Ultrashort Electron Bunches in Underdense Plasma 27 2.1 Classical Description of Propagation of Electron Bunches in Underdense Plasma . 29 2.2 Propagation of Electron Bunches Driven by LWFA . 33 2.2.1 Collective Deceleration of Electron Bunch . 36 2.2.2 Self-focusing of Electron Bunch . 39
Comparing Decentralized Gradient Descent Approaches and Guarantees

This work studies our recently developed decentralized algorithm, decentralized alternating projected gradient descent algorithm, called Dec-AltProjGDmin, for solving the following low-rank (LR) matrix recovery problem: recover an LR matrix from independent column-wise linear projections (LR column-wise Compressive Sensing). In recent work, we presented constructive convergence guarantees for Dec-AltProjGDmin under simple assumptions. By "constructive", we mean that the convergence time lower bound is provided for achieving any error level ε. However, our guarantee was stated for the equal neighbor consensus algorithm (at each iteration, each node computes the average of the data of all its neighbors) while most existing results do not assume the use of a specific consensus algorithm, but instead state guarantees in terms of the weights matrix eigenvalues. In order to compare with these results, we first modify our result to be in this form. Our second and main contribution is a theoretical and experimental comparison of our new result with the best existing one from the decentralized GD literature that also provides a convergence time bound for values of ε that are large enough. The existing guarantee is for a different problem setting and holds under different assumptions than ours and hence the comparison is not very clear cut. However, we are not aware of any other provably correct algorithms for decentralized LR matrix recovery in any other settings either.
Insights into the Memory Demands of Speech Recognition Algorithms

The vision of pervasive computing is one of invisible computers interacting with humans in all aspects of their lives. These invisible computers can be embedded in anything from specialized portable devices to articles of clothing. To make this vision a reality, efficient, convenient, and effective human communication with computers must be provided. Keyboards and mice are effective in a desktop environment, but these are clumsy, awkward , and not well suited for mobile/hidden computers. Personal digital assistants and cellular telephones have added primitive utterance recognition to improve communication, but the interaction efficiency is several orders of magnitude less than that of normal human interaction. Software technologies do exist to support continuous, accurate speech recognition. The problem lies on the hardware side. The speech rate supported by even the most high-end desktop microprocessors is extremely limited due the processing requirements of the software. The performance of processors that are more suitable in a portable environment are even worse. In this paper, we analyze a number of parameters affecting the potential performance of speech recognition software, with particular emphasis on the demands made of the underlying memory system. We observe that the majority of 'poorly behaved' memory accesses are directed to the knowledge based traversed during the search phases of speech recognition, suggesting potential benefit from memory space partitioning. Speech recognition software technology has emerged in recent years to present a viable solution to the problems of human-computer interaction [1]. Ideally, such technology would be embedded into all invisible and portable computers to enable efficient human-computer communication. Unfortunately , computing platforms ideally situated to take advantage of speech recognition and other natural I/O capabilities, such as PDAs and other hand held computing devices, simply do not have the memory systems and processing power to achieve a reasonable trade-off between interaction rate and recognition accuracy. Recent studies have shown that the computational demands of current generation speech recognition technology are enough to tax even high-end desktop processors [1,6]. Obviously , high-end desktop processors do not make sense in the portable domain due to their high power consumption and large size. Thus, we observe a performance gap of about 20x between the current generation of processors usable in portable environments and the computation demands of speech recognition. Further, it is reasonable to surmise that demands for performance will continue to grow with increased speech recognition accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we evaluate the …
Student Transition into Kindergarten: A Case Study of the Reggio Emilia Approach

The purpose of this intrinsic case study was to arrive at a better understanding of what teachers contribute to the unique issues of student transition from a Reggio Emilia approach preschool into kindergarten. Transition was defined as “. reciprocal organization activities and cooperation (vertical connection), one of the aims of which was to connect with families (horizontal connection)” (Ahtola et al., 2016, p. 169). The central question of the research is; what do Reggio Emilia approach schoolteachers contribute to transition? Vygotsky’s (1978) social constructivist theory involved the “actual relations between individuals” (p. 57), and social constructivist theory, along with the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and the more knowledgeable other (MKO) guided this study. The concepts with Vygotsky’s theory empower students in the course of transition into kindergarten. This study explored the behavior of 15 participating preschool teachers at a Reggio Emilia approach school in the Midwest. Data collection in the field was individual interviews, observations, and journal entries, and analysis was primarily through direct interpretation and secondarily with the individual instance. Fifteen Midwestern Reggio Emilia approach teachers were interviewed and observed culminating in analysis and conclusions from the research that identified teachers’ behaviors that contributed to successful transition into kindergarten. The study data was coded and categorized that resulted in establishing themes of the Reggio Emilia phenomenon. Study findings were reviewed and results revealed in association with the literature and relevant theories and implications.
The memristor-based associative learning network with retention loss

The memristor is an emerging device in nanotechnology, which provides nanoscale size, low power consumption and high density. It has been widely used in neural networks where memristors are utilised as synaptic weights (connection sites) between neurons. In particular, current research focuses on the spiking-time dependant plasticity (STDP) which is an important synaptic modification rule based on the timings of the pre- and postsynaptic spikes. It has been revealed that the memristor is intrinsically similar with a synapse and capable to mimic the long-term depression (LTD) and long-term potentiation (LTP) behaviours under the STDP rule. Further studies show that the associative learning can be mimicked by memristive neural networks through proper learning rules. However, such studies focus on demonstrating the process of building the association, which lacks the retention loss process of forgetting the association. In this paper, a rate-based term is proposed to improve the previous model, and therefore the retention loss process can be implemented in the given network. The results demonstrate that the network with the improved model can successfully reproduce the retention loss process meanwhile retaining the process of building the association.
Implementing Static Router based on Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking is changing the way we manage and create networks. Current networking has not kept with the pace of development that other fields were experiencing. Not much progress has happened in last 3 decades in networking. Today's networks are not flexible and configuring network devices is even more painful. Each and every networking device has to be configured individually. Even small changes in network require lot of configuration work. We also need middleboxes such as routers, firewalls, load balancers, intrusion detection and prevention systems for securing, scaling and fault tolerant purposes. But all these middleboxes are vendor specific and proprietary. We ourselves cannot enhance or add the features according to our needs. SDN is solving most of the problems by providing network programmability, flexibility and centralization. SDN separates the forwarding path and control logic which are called data plane and control plane. For rapid adaptation we require various SDN applications running on control plane such as router, firewall and load balancer. In this paper, we are implementing Static Router application on top of POX SDN controller. We tested our router on Mininet emulator.
Pricing of Warrants with Stock Price Dependent Threshold Conditions

Warrants with stock price dependent threshold conditions give the right to buy specially issued stocks, if the performance of the stock price satisfies some requirements. Existence of these derivatives changes the price process of the underlying. We show that in the presence of such warrants one cannot assume that the stock market is arbitrage free and that the stock is tradeable at every time moment with the same price for buying and selling. This means that the usual methods for deriving fair prices for such warrants cannot be used. We start from a simple model for the firm's value process and discuss some ways to specify a related model for the stock price process in the presence of warrants with threshold conditions. We also discuss how indifference pricing approach can be used for pricing such warrants.
ERL Timing and optimized CBETA models

6 Appendix 10 6.1 Mathematica CBETA Model . 10 6.2 Bmad CBETA Hybrid Model . 10 6.2. 1 Lattice Overlay . 13 6.2. 2 Tao Symmetry Script . 14
Impact of Body Composition on the Risk of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Recurrence After Liver Transplantation

Background: Body composition parameters are reported to influence the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) recurrence after liver resection, yet data on patients undergoing liver transplantation are scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of the amount of abdominal adipose tissue and skeletal muscles on the risk of HCC recurrence after liver transplantation. Methods: This was a retrospective observational study performed on 77 HCC patients after liver transplantation. Subcutaneous fat area (SFA), visceral fat area, psoas muscle area and total skeletal muscle area were assessed on computed tomography on the level of L3 vertebra and divided by square meters of patient height. The primary outcome measure was five-year recurrence-free survival. Results: Recurrence-free survival in the entire cohort was 95.7%, 90.8%, and 86.5% after one, three, and five years post-transplantation, respectively. SFA was significantly associated with the risk of HCC recurrence (p = 0.013), whereas no significant effects were found for visceral fat and skeletal muscle indices. The optimal cut-off for SFA for prediction of recurrence was 71.5 cm2/m2. Patients with SFA < 71.5 cm2/m2 and ≥71.5 cm2/m2 exhibited five-year recurrence-free survival of 96.0% and 55.4%, respectively (p = 0.001). Conclusions: Excessive amount of subcutaneous adipose tissue is a risk factor for HCC recurrence after liver transplantation and may be considered in patient selection process.