Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heterologous Protein Expression by Lactobacillus casei Isolated from Chicken Intestine

In this study, lactic acid bacteria (LAB) were isolated from healthy chicken intestine and determined for probiotic properties. Six isolates with potential probiotic properties were selected and screened for their feasibility of heterologous protein expression by selection of erythromycin sensitive isolates. Two erythromycin-sensitive isolates were found and further subjected to plasmid curing process. One isolate could completely eliminate its indigenous plasmids, identified as Lactobacillus casei by 16S rRNA sequencing and was designated as L. casei RCEID08. This isolate could stably maintain the E. coli-Lactobacillus shuttle vector, pRCEID-LC13.9. Further electrotransformation of L. casei RCEID08 with recombinant pLC13.9:LDH-PRO1 containing green fluorescent protein (GFP), tetanus toxin fragment C (TTFC) or VP2 of infectious bursal disease virus (IBVD) found that all recombinant L. casei can express these heterologous proteins. Thus, our probiotic L. casei isolate can be used as host for expression of various heterologous proteins and could possibly be further developed as the alternate oral delivery system of various biomolecules for biotechnological
High-dimensional covariance estimation by minimizing ℓ1-penalized log-determinant divergence

Given i.i. d. observations of a random vector X 2 R p , we study the problem of estimating both its covariance matrix � ∗ , and its inverse covariance or concentration matrix � ∗ = (� ∗ ) −1 . We estimate � ∗ by minimizing an l1-penalized log-determinant Bregman divergence; in the multivariate Gaussian case, this approach corresponds to l1-penalized maximum likelihood, and the structure of � ∗ is specified by the graph of an associated Gaussian Markov random field. We analyze the performance of this estim ator under high-dimensional scaling, in which the number of nodes in the graph p, the number of edges s and the maximum node degree d, are allowed to grow as a function of the sample size n. In addition to the parameters (p, s, d), our analysis identifies other key quantities that control rates: (a) the l∞-operator norm of the true covariance matrix � ∗ ; and (b) the l∞ operator norm of the submatrix ∗, where S indexes the graph edges, and ∗ = (� ∗ ) −1 (� ∗ ) −1 ; and (c) a mutual incoherence or irrepresentability measure on the matrix ∗ and (d) the rate of decay 1/f(n, δ) on the probabilities {|b n � ∗| > δ}, where b � n is the sample covariance based on n samples. Our first result establishes consistency of our estimate b � in the elementwise maximum-norm. This in turn allows us to derive convergence rates in Frobenius and spectral norms, with improvements upon existing results for graphs with maximum node degrees d = o( p s). In our second result, we show that with probability converging to one, the estimate b � correctly specifies the zero pattern of the concentration matrix � ∗ . We illustrate our theoretical results via simulations for various graphs and problem parameters, showing good correspondences between the theoretical predictions and behavior in simulations. 1. Introduction. The area of high-dimensional statistics deals with estimation in the “large p, small n” setting, where p and n correspond, respectively, to the dimensionality of the dat a and the sample size. Such high-dimensional problems arise in a variety of applications, among them remote sensing, computational biology and natural language processing, where the model dimension may be comparable or substantially larger than the sample size. It is well-known that such high-dimensional scaling can lead to dramatic breakdowns in many classical procedures. In the absence of additional model assumptions, it is frequently impossible to obtain consistent procedures when p ≫ n. Accordingly, an active line of statistical research is based on imposing various restrictions on the model—-for instance, sparsity, manifold structure, or graphical model structure—-and then studying the scaling behavior of different estimators as a function of sample size n, ambient dimension p and additional parameters related to these structural assu mptions.
A PLANNING APPROACH TO DECLARER PLAY IN CONTRACT BRIDGE

Although game‐tree search works well in perfect‐information games, it is less suitable for imperfect‐information games such as contract bridge. The lack of knowledge about the opponents’ possible moves gives the game tree a very large branching factor, making it impossible to search a significant portion of this tree in a reasonable amount of time.
Conducting Monetary Policy with Inflation Targets

Since the early 1990s, a number of central banks have adopted numerical inflation targets as a guide for monetary policy. The targets are intended to help central banks achieve and maintain price stability by specifying an explicit goal for monetary policy based on a given time path for a particular measure of inflation. In some cases the targets are expressed as a range for inflation over time, while in other cases they are expressed as a path for the inflation rate itself. The measure of inflation that is targeted varies but is typically a broad measure of prices, such as a consumer or retail price index. > At a conceptual level, adopting inflation targets may necessitate fundamental changes in the way monetary policy responds to economic conditions. For example, inflation targeting requires a highly forward-looking monetary policy. Given lags in the effects of monetary policy on inflation, central banks seeking to achieve a target for inflation need to forecast inflation and adjust policy in response to projected deviations of inflation from target. But central banks without an explicit inflation target may also be forward looking and equally focused on a long-run goal of price stability. Thus, at a practical level, adopting inflation targets may only formalize a strategy for policy that was already more or less in place. If so, targets might improve the transparency, accountability, and credibility of monetary policy but have little or no impact on the way policy instruments are adjusted to incoming information about the economy. Kahn and Parrish examine how central banks have changed their policy procedures after adopting explicit inflation targets. They conclude that, while inflation targets have perhaps improved the transparency, accountability, and credibility of monetary policy, it is difficult to discern any significant and systematic changes in the way policymakers adjust policy instruments to incoming information after adopting inflation targets.
Application of Intraoperative Computed Tomography With or Without Navigation System in Surgical Correction of Spinal Deformity: A Preliminary Result of 59 Consecutive Human Cases

Study Design. A retrospective analysis of patients undergoing spinal deformity correction surgery by the assistance of intraoperative computed tomography (iCT) with or without navigation system. Objective. To share our preliminary experience and analysis of the iCT navigation system applied to spinal deformity surgery. Summary of Background Data. The iCT navigation system has been shown to improve accuracy and safety in posterior instrumentation. It not only decreased the operation time but also prevented excessive radiation exposure to the medical staff. To date, there are only few reports about the application of the iCT navigation system in spinal deformity surgery. Methods. From April 2009 to September 2010, 59 patients who had a diagnosis of scoliosis, kyphosis, or scoliokyphosis and underwent iCT-assisted surgical correction were included. Without randomization, 28 patients were operated with the iCT-navigation system, and the other 31 patients were operated with standard procedure under iCT assistance. The detailed procedures, preoperative and intraoperative images were illustrated. The accuracy of screw placement, time for screw insertion, postoperative correction rate, and iCT scanning data were analyzed. Results. There were significant differences between 2 groups in (1) the preoperative Cobb angle (76.2° and 62.6° in the navigation and non-navigation groups), (2) the accuracy and the revision rate of thoracic pedicle screws and total pedicle screws, and (3) the average screw insertion time. The breach rate and the revision rate of thoracic pedicle screws and total pedicle screws were significantly lower and the average screw insertion time was significantly lesser in the navigation group than in the non-navigation group. There were no statistically significant difference in (1) the breach rate and the revision rate of lumbar pedicle screws, (2) the mean iCT scanning time and time-out, (3) the mean number of fusion segments, (4) the mean number of iCT scans, and (5) the postoperative correction rate. Complications were encountered in 2 patients in the non-navigation group but none in the navigation group. There was no reoperation due to implant malposition in both groups. Conclusion. The iCT navigation system provides desirable accuracy of posterior spinal instrumentation for patients during surgical correction of spinal deformity without radiation exposure to the medical staff, especially in thoracic spine instrumentation. Meanwhile, the iCT in itself is an effective means of assessing complex instrumentation of the spinal deformity.
Kinetic Simulations of Electron Acceleration by Dispersive Scale Alfvén Waves in Jupiter's Magnetosphere

Electron acceleration by dispersive scale Alfvén waves at Jupiter is investigated using a Gyrofluid‐Kinetic‐Electron model. Specifically, the simulations consider the propagation of an Alfvén wave perturbation from the center of the Io plasma torus to high‐latitude regions that are consistent with recent Juno satellite observations (e.g., Allegrini et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL073180; Mauk, et al., 2017a, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23648; Mauk, et al., 2017b, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL072286; Szalay et al., 2018, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JE005752). As in those observations, the energized electron spectra is broadband in nature and the majority of the energization is under the interaction of inertial Alfvén waves at high latitudes. The extent of the energization associated with these waves is proportional to both the magnitude of the wave perturbation and the ratio of the torus to high‐latitude density.
Minimizing Expected Head Movement in One-Dimensional and Two-Dimensional Mass Storage Systems

Given a set of records with known access probabilities, the problems of record placement, page allocation, and dynamic record placement to mimmlze read/write head movement for sequential as well as batched processing are discussed. The distance traveled by the head in the systems under consideration is modeled by the rectilinear (Ll), Euclidean (L2), and maximum (L=) metrics. Some open problems are mentioned at the end of the paper.
Do Infrastructure Reforms Reduce the Effect of Corruption? Theory and Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper investigates the interaction between corruption and governance at the sector level. A simple model illustrates how both an increase in regulatory autonomy and privatization may influence the effect of corruption. The interaction is analyzed empirically using a fixed-effects estimator on a panel of 153 electricity distribution firms across 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1995–2007. Greater corruption is associated with lower firm labor productivity, but this association is reduced when an independent regulatory agency is present. These results survive a range of robustness checks, including instrumenting for regulatory governance, controlling for a large range of observables, and using several different corruption measures. The association between corruption and productivity also appears weaker for privately owned firms compared to publicly owned firms, though this result is somewhat less robust.
Detection of Verocytotoxin from Stool and Serological Testing of Patients with Diarrhea Caused by Escherichia coli O157: H 7

The detecion of verocytotoxin (VT) in stool and measurement of antibodies against VT and three antigens (unheated‐antigen, LPS, and flagellin) of Escherichia coli O157: H7 in the serum of patients with diarrhea were examined. Five of 14 inpatients during an outbreak had fecal VT2 in stool taken within 5 days of onset to hospitalization. Among these 5, 3 of them also had fecal VT‐producing E. coli (VTEC) serotype O157: H7, whereas the other 2 did not. In the passive hemagglutination (PHA) test with formalinized sheep red blood cells sensitized with theee VTEC O157: H7 antigens, 49 (74.2%) of 66 outbreak patients and 3 of 3 sporadic cases had antibodies against both or one of unheated‐antigen and LPS of E. coli O157, but none had antibody against flagellin. In addition, anti‐VT2 antibody was demonstrated in serum samples from 15 (94%) of 16 inpatients and 2 (4%) of 50 outpatients in an outbreak by a VT‐enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (VT‐ELISA). These results showed that serological assay particularly for antibodies against VT and unheated‐antigen or LPS of VTEC O157 may provide a useful tool for diagnosis of infection with VTEC O157.
Impacts of a continued Mathematics Education program on teaching practice in public schools of Jaguariaíva, Paraná

This article investigates the effects of a continuing education program in Mathematical Education for early elementary school teachers in Jaguariaíva, Paraná. The research, carried out within the Postgraduate Program in Science and Mathematics Teaching at Lutheran University of Brazil, adopted a qualitative approach, using questionnaires, reports, and observations. The training program, grounded in the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) and school demands, emphasized playfulness and the use of digital technologies. The results showed positive impacts on teaching practices, including the acquisition of skills for remote teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. The importance of the BNCC and continuous education to enhance pedagogical practice and the curricular of initial education courses is highlighted.
Tracing Trails: Implications of Tax Information Exchange Programs for Customs Administrations

The G20 recently agreed to adopt multilateral automatic tax information exchange as a global standard in the fight against cross-border tax fraud and evasion. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has, since the late 1980s, promoted tax information exchange between tax authorities to help its member states identify residents’ incomes and assets contained in tax havens. The global customs community could benefit from a similar type of endeavour as crossborder trade on which customs administrations impose levies is as susceptible to tax evasion as other cross-border economic activities. Additionally, revenue generated by customs administrations accounts for a considerable share of government tax revenue. The World Customs Organization (WCO) has developed a variety of instruments and tools dealing with the exchange of customs information for its Members. Customs administrations hoping to enhance the exchange of customs information can focus on identifying trails that trade transactions leave not only in export countries and other competing import countries but also in the trade payment process.
Connecting Language and Knowledge Bases with Embedding Models for Relation Extraction

This paper proposes a novel approach for relation extraction from free text which is trained to jointly use information from the text and from existing knowledge. Our model is based on scoring functions that operate by learning low-dimensional embeddings of words, entities and relationships from a knowledge base. We empirically show on New York Times articles aligned with Freebase relations that our approach is able to efficiently use the extra information provided by a large subset of Freebase data (4M entities, 23k relationships) to improve over methods that rely on text features alone.
Deliberate self-harm in adolescents in Oxford, 1985-1995.

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) has been one of the major health problems of adolescents in the U.K. for many years. Any changes in rates of DSH or the demographic characteristics of the patient population are likely to have important implications for clinical services and for future suicidal behaviour. Following a decline in rates in the late 1970s and mid 1980s, there were signs in the late 1980s that rates were beginning to increase again. We have used data collected by the Oxford Monitoring System for Attempted Suicide on the basis of patients presenting to the general hospital in Oxford to review trends in DSH in under 20-year-olds between 1985 and 1995. There was a substantial increase in the numbers of teenage DSH patients during the 11-year study period, with an increase between 1985-1986 and 1994-1995 of 27.7% in males, 28.3% in females, and 28.1% overall. There were no demographic changes within the catchment area to explain a change of this size. As rates of repetition of DSH also increased in both sexes during the study period the overall number of episodes of DSH rose even more between 1985-1986 and 1994-1995 (+56.9% in males, +46.3% in females, and +49.4% overall). As in previous studies the majority of adolescents had interpersonal problems and/or difficulties with studying or employment. Self-poisoning with paracetamol and paracetamol compounds became increasingly common such that by 1995 these were used in almost two-thirds of overdoses. The recent increase in DSH in adolescents has important implications for general hospital and adolescent psychiatric services. The greater frequency of repetition of DSH may herald increased future suicide rates. The case for restricting the amount of paracetamol available is overwhelming. Evaluative trials of specific interventions following adolescent DSH are urgently required.
Perceived need for care and health care utilization among depressed and anxious patients with and without suicidal ideation.

BACKGROUND Information is scarce concerning the perceived needs and the amount of health-care utilization of persons with suicidal ideation (SI) compared to those without SI. AIMS To describe the needs and health care use of persons with and without SI and to investigate whether these differences are associated with the severity of the axis-I symptomatology. METHOD Data were obtained from 1,699 respondents with a depressive and/or anxiety disorder who participated in the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety. Persons with and without SI were distinguished. Outcome variables were perceived needs and health-care utilization. We used multivariate regression in two models: (1) adjusted only for sociodemographic variables and (2) adjusted additionally for severity of axis-I symptomatology. RESULTS Persons with SI had higher odds for both unmet and met needs in almost all domains and made more intensive use of mental-health care. Differences in needs and health-care utilization of persons with and without SI were strongly associated with severity of axis I symptomatology. CONCLUSIONS Our results validate previous findings about perceived needs and health-care use of persons with SI. The results also suggest that suicidal persons are more seriously ill, and that they need more professional care, dedication, and specialized expertise than anxious and depressed persons without SI, especially in the domains of information and referral.
Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields for Improved Sequence Segmentation and Labeling

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data. Our approach is based on extending the minimum entropy regularization framework to the structured prediction case, yielding a training objective that combines unlabeled conditional entropy with labeled conditional likelihood. Although the training objective is no longer concave, it can still be used to improve an initial model (e.g. obtained from supervised training) by iterative ascent. We apply our new training algorithm to the problem of identifying gene and protein mentions in biological texts, and show that incorporating unlabeled data improves the performance of the supervised CRF in this case.
Dietary Supplementation with Bupleuri Radix Reduces Oxidative Stress Occurring during Growth by Regulating Rumen Microbes and Metabolites

Simple Summary Oxidative stress is closely related to animal health. Bupleuri Radix, a well-known Chinese herb, has an important antioxidant capacity. In this study, we discovered that supplementing Bupleuri Radix to the diet could reduce oxidative stress during the growth stage of Shanbei fine-wool sheep. In addition, we analyzed the antioxidant mechanism of Bupleuri Radix by combining metabolomics and microbiomics and discovered that Bupleuri Radix may increase the antioxidant capacity of Shanbei fine-wool sheep by regulating rumen bacteria and metabolites. The findings indicate that implementing appropriate nutrition strategies can improve the health of Shanbei fine-wool sheep. Abstract Oxidative stress (OS) in ruminants is closely associated with disease; thus, improving antioxidant capacity is an important strategy for maintaining host health. Bupleuri Radix (BR) could significantly improve host health and stress levels. However, the clear antioxidant mechanism of the function of BR remains unknown. In the current study, LC-MS metabolomics combined with 16S rRNA gene sequencing was employed to explore the effects of BR on rumen microbiota and metabolites in Shanbei Fine-Wool Sheep (SFWS), and Spearman correlation analyses of rumen microbiota, metabolites, and OS were performed to investigate the mechanism of antioxidant function of BR. Our results indicated that as SFWS grows, levels of OS and antioxidant capacity increase dramatically, but providing BR to SFWS enhances antioxidant capacity while decreasing OS. Rumen microbiota and OS are strongly correlated, with total antioxidant capacity (T-AOC) showing a significant negative correlation with Succiniclasticum and a positive correlation with Ruminococcus. Importantly, the Chao1 index was significantly negatively correlated with malondialdehyde (MDA) and positively correlated with superoxide dismutase (SOD) and T-AOC. Two biomarkers connected to the antioxidant effects of BR, 5,6-DHET and LPA (a-25:0/0:0), were screened according to the results of metabolomics and Spearman analysis of rumen contents, and a significant relationship between the concentration of rumen metabolites and OS was found. Five metabolic pathways, including glycerolipid, glutathione, nucleotide, D-amino acid, and inositol phosphate metabolism, may have a role in OS. The integrated results indicate that rumen microbiota and metabolites are strongly related to OS and that BR is responsible for reducing OS and improving antioxidant capacity in post-weaned SFWS. These findings provide new strategies to reduce OS occurring during SFWS growth.
Prevalence and risk analysis of bovine brucellosis in Asella organized dairy farm, Oromia Regional State, South East Ethiopia

A cross-sectional study was conducted on organized Dairy Farm at Asella, Oromia Regional State of Ethiopia to determine seroprevalence and risk analysis of bovine brucellosis in May, 2016. A total of 304 samples were collected; all were tested and confirmed serologically using Rose Bengal plate test (RBPT) and complement fixation test (CFT). Out of 304 samples tested, overall seroprevalence of RBPT and CFT results was12.48% (38) and 9.87% (30) respectively, which was higher in animals above two years age than younger one. History of abortion and retained fetal membrane were found to be significantly (p 0.05) was observed between cross and local dairy cattle. The result showed the high prevalence of bovine brucellosis in the farm. Hence, culling of the positive dairy cattle and practicing good management should result in a control and prevent of the brucellosis. Key words: Asella, brucellosis, dairy cattle, seroprevalence, risk factors.