Tropical Jacobian and the generic fiber of the ultra-discrete periodic Toda lattice are isomorphic

We prove that the general isolevel set of the ultra-discrete periodic Toda lattice is isomorphic to the tropical Jacobian associated with the tropical spectral curve. This result implies that the theta function solution obtained in the authors' previous paper is the complete solution. We also propose a method to solve the initial value problem.Comment: 14 page

Regulation of the JNK pathway by TGF-beta activated kinase 1 in rheumatoid arthritis synoviocytes.

c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) contributes to metalloproteinase (MMP) gene expression and joint destruction in inflammatory arthritis. It is phosphorylated by at least two upstream kinases, the mitogen-activated protein kinase kinases (MEK) MKK4 and MKK7, which are, in turn, phosphorylated by MEK kinases (MEKKs). However, the MEKKs that are most relevant to JNK activation in synoviocytes have not been determined. These studies were designed to assess the hierarchy of upstream MEKKs, MEKK1, MEKK2, MEKK3, and transforming growth factor-beta activated kinase (TAK)1, in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Using either small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown or knockout fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLSs), MEKK1, MEKK2, or MEKK3 deficiency (either alone or in combination) had no effect on IL-1beta-stimulated phospho-JNK (P-JNK) induction or MMP expression. However, TAK1 deficiency significantly decreased P-JNK, P-MKK4 and P-MKK7 induction compared with scrambled control. TAK1 knockdown did not affect p38 activation. Kinase assays showed that TAK1 siRNA significantly suppressed JNK kinase function. In addition, MKK4 and MKK7 kinase activity were significantly decreased in TAK1 deficient FLSs. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays demonstrated a significant decrease in IL-1beta induced AP-1 activation due to TAK1 knockdown. Quantitative PCR showed that TAK1 deficiency significantly decreased IL-1beta-induced MMP3 gene expression and IL-6 protein expression. These results show that TAK1 is a critical pathway for IL-1beta-induced activation of JNK and JNK-regulated gene expression in FLSs. In contrast to other cell lineages, MEKK1, MEKK2, and MEKK3 did not contribute to JNK phosphorylation in FLSs. The data identify TAK1 as a pivotal upstream kinase and potential therapeutic target to modulate synoviocyte activation in RA

Introduction of New Features in Writer Verification Based on Finger-writing of a Simple Symbol

In this study, a method of verifying an individual from their style of drawing simple symbols that everyone is familiar with and never forgets was studied. Individuals were asked to draw symbols using their fingertips on a digital device screen. Various features, such as the finger pressure, the touch area, and the touch direction, which were directly detected by a tablet device, were measured. In addition, the finger volume, force, and amount of work that were derived from the directly detected features were calculated. Subsequently, the verification performance of these features was evaluated

ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions (Artifact)

This artifact provides the Scala, Haskell, and Purescript implementations of ContextWorkflow, an embedded domain-specific language for interruptible and compensable executions, and demonstrates the maze search example described in the companion paper. The Haskell and Purescript implementations provide the core language constructs including texttt{checkpoint} for partial aborts and texttt{sub} for sub-workflows and show that ContextWorkflow can be embedded in eager and lazy languages as described in the companion paper. The Scala implementation does not only provide user-friendly syntax of ContextWorkflow but also gives the maze search example as an interactive GUI application

ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions

Context-aware applications, whose behavior reactively depends on the time-varying status of the surrounding environment - such as network connection, battery level, and sensors - are getting more and more pervasive and important. The term "context-awareness" usually suggests prompt reactions to context changes: as the context change signals that the current execution cannot be continued, the application should immediately abort its execution, possibly does some clean-up tasks, and suspend until the context allows it to restart. Interruptions, or asynchronous exceptions, are useful to achieve context-awareness. It is, however, difficult to program with interruptions in a compositional way in most programming languages because their support is too primitive, relying on synchronous exception handling mechanism such as try-catch. We propose a new domain-specific language ContextWorkflow for interruptible programs as a solution to the problem. A basic unit of an interruptible program is a workflow, i.e., a sequence of atomic computations accompanied with compensation actions. The uniqueness of ContextWorkflow is that, during its execution, a workflow keeps watching the context between atomic actions and decides if the computation should be continued, aborted, or suspended. Our contribution of this paper is as follows; (1) the design of a workflow-like language with asynchronous interruption, checkpointing, sub-workflows and suspension; (2) a formal semantics of the core language; (3) a monadic interpreter corresponding to the semantics; and (4) its concrete implementation as an embedded domain-specific language in Scala

Reproductive success of two male morphs in a free-ranging population of Bornean orangutans

The reproductive success of male primates is not always associated with dominance status. For example, even though male orangutans exhibit intra-sexual dimorphism and clear dominance relationships exist among males, previous studies have reported that both morphs are able to sire offspring. The present study aimed to compare the reproductive success of two male morphs, and to determine whether unflanged males sired offspring in a free-ranging population of Bornean orangutans, using 12 microsatellite loci to determine the paternity of eight infants. A single flanged male sired most of the offspring from parous females, and an unflanged male sired a firstborn. This is consistent with our observation that the dominant flanged male showed little interest in nulliparous females, whereas the unflanged males frequently mated with them. This suggests that the dominant flanged male monopolizes the fertilization of parous females and that unflanged males take advantage of any mating opportunities that arise in the absence of the flanged male, even though the conception probability of nulliparous females is relatively low

An extension of the entropic chaos degree and its positive effect

The Lyapunov exponent is used to quantify the chaos of a dynamical system, by characterizing the exponential sensitivity of an initial point on the dynamical system. However, we cannot directly compute the Lyapunov exponent for a dynamical system without its dynamical equation, although some estimation methods do exist. Information dynamics introduces the entropic chaos degree to measure the strength of chaos of the dynamical system. The entropic chaos degree can be used to compute the strength of chaos with a practical time series. It may seem like a kind of fnite space Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, which then indicates the relation between the entropic chaos degree and the Lyapunov exponent. In this paper, we attempt to extend the defnition of the entropic chaos degree on a d-dimensional Euclidean space to improve the ability to measure the stength of chaos of the dynamical system and show several relations between the extended entropic chaos degree and the Lyapunov exponen