Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repeated stress exposure results in a survival–reproduction trade-off in Drosophila melanogaster

While insect cold tolerance has been well studied, the vast majority of work has focused on the effects of a single cold exposure. However, many abiotic environmental stresses, including temperature, fluctuate within an organism's lifespan. Given that organisms may trade-off survival at the cost of future reproduction, we investigated the effects of multiple cold exposures on survival and fertility in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. We found that multiple cold exposures significantly decreased mortality compared with the same length of exposure in a single sustained bout, but significantly decreased fecundity (as measured by r, the intrinsic rate of increase) as well, owing to a shift in sex ratio. This change was reflected in a long-term decrease in glycogen stores in multiply exposed flies, while a brief effect on triglyceride stores was observed, suggesting flies are reallocating energy stores. Given that many environments are not static, this trade-off indicates that investigating the effects of repeated stress exposure is important for understanding and predicting physiological responses in the wild.
Treatment patterns in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus treated with glucagon‐like peptide‐1 receptor agonists: Higher adherence and persistence with dulaglutide compared with once‐weekly exenatide and liraglutide

To compare adherence (proportion of days covered [PDC]), persistence, and treatment patterns among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) newly initiating glucagon‐like peptide‐1 receptor agonists (GLP‐1RAs). More specifically, the main objectives were to compare dulaglutide vs exenatide once weekly and dulaglutide vs liraglutide.
Differential response of bovine monocyte‐derived macrophages and dendritic cells to infection with Salmonella typhimurium in a low‐dose model in vitro

Exposing bovine dendritic cells (DC) and macrophages (MΦ) to Salmonella typhimurium at a ratio of 1 cell to 10 bacteria had a cytotoxic effect that was not evident with a ratio of 1000 cells to 1 bacterium. This lower dose was considered to mimic more closely the in vivo situation and a comparison was made with this model of the consequences of infection for MΦ and DC. DC infected with S. typhimurium up‐regulated cell surface expression of major histocompatibility class I (MHC‐I), MHC‐II, CD40, CD80 and CD86. In contrast, infected MΦ did not exhibit detectable changes in expression of cell surface molecules, except for a marginal increase in CD40. mRNA transcription for tumour necrosis factor‐α, interleukin (IL)‐1β, IL‐6 and inducible nitric oxide synthase was up‐regulated in both infected DC and infected MΦ, although mRNA transcription for granulocyte–macrophage colony‐stimulating factor and IL‐12p40 was up‐regulated only in infected DC and for IL‐10 was only in infected MΦ. Infected DC had an increased ability to stimulate both allogeneic and antigen‐specific T‐cell responses compared to non‐infected controls. In contrast, infected MΦ showed an increased ability to induce allogeneic responses but this was less than seen for DC and no enhancement of ability to induce antigen‐specific T cell responses was seen. Thus, in a low‐dose infection model that does not result in the cytotoxicity of a substantial percentage of antigen presenting cells, bovine MΦ and DC respond differently to infection with S. typhimurium and this could have important implications for the development of the immune response.
Coverage control of multiple ocean vehicles for environment monitoring with energy constraints

A coverage control algorithm in unknown environment is proposed for the multi-vehicle systems in this paper. The measurement white-noise is taken into consideration while learning the interest information online. The Kalman Filter (KF) is introduced to eliminate the noise disturbance and provide us a set of accurately sampled-data. Then, we describe an adaptive algorithm to approximate the sensory function by using the sampled-data from KF. A decentralized adaptive control architecture is proposed to drive the vehicles converge to the optimal coverage configuration with the estimated Voronoi Centroids. Finally, simulations are carried out to demonstrate the adaptive estimation algorithm and show us that the multi-vehicle systems will converge to the optimal coverage configuration.
Latent semantic indexing: a probabilistic analysis

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is an information retrieval technique based on the spectral analysis of the term-document matrix, whose empirical success had heretofore been without rigorous prediction and explanation. We prove that, under certain conditions, LSI does succeed in capturing the underlying semantics of the corpus and achieves improved retrieval performance. We propose the technique of random projection as a way of speeding up LSI. We complement our theorems with encouraging experimental results. We also argue that our results may be viewed in a more general framework, as a theoretical basis for the use of spectral methods in a wider class of applications such as collaborative filtering.
Applicability and costs of nanofiltration in combination with photocatalysis for the treatment of dye house effluents

Summary Nanofiltration (NF) is a capable method for the separation of dyes, which can support and even improve the applicability of photocatalysis in effluent-treatment processes. The membrane process usually will need a special pre-treatment to avoid precipitation and fouling on the membrane surface. Conceptually NF can be applied in the pre-treatment prior to the catalytic reactor or in connection with the reactor to separate the liquid phase from the reaction system and to recycle finely suspended catalysts and/or organic compounds. When concerning such reaction systems on a bigger scale, cost figures will prove the usefulness of those concepts. Different applications of photocatalysis on the lab-scale have been published in recent years. Membrane technology is used almost in all those processes and an overview will be given of those recently published systems that have been reported to be potentially useful for a further scale-up. NF membranes are mostly used for the more sophisticated separation step of these processes and the additional costs of the NF treatment, without any associated equipments, will be described and illustrated. The total specific costs of industrial NF treatment processes in usefully adjusted and designed plants range from 1 to 6 US$/m3 treated effluent. Combination concepts will have a good precondition for further development and upscaling, if the NF costs discussed here in detail will be, together with the costs of photocatalysis, economically acceptable.
Fabrication of microsphere plate electron multiplier device

Microsphere plate (MSP) is a new type of electron multiplier device. It is similar to the traditional microchannel plate (MCP) in dimensions and model of operation. Compared with the MCP electron multiplier, the MSP has some unique characteristics such as a high electron gain, without ion feedback and easy to be fabricated, thus it is widely used in the fields of imaging and detecting. However, there are some key technologies to fabricate a satisfied MSP. In this paper, the whole fabrication process of MSP was introduced and some of major processes such as the formation of glass beads, the sintering of MSP body, and the formation of dynode and electrodes were specially discussed. At the end of the paper, the optimal processed for the fabrication of MSP was given.
Understanding differences in process perspectives between developers and acquirers in off-the-shelf-based custom software projects undertaken in Indonesia

In Off-the-shelf (OTS)-based custom software projects there are common and different processes between software developers and acquirers. Better understanding of these differences may help to initiate reconciling perspectives between these stakeholders for managing the software processes. An online survey was conducted to explore the involvement of two main stakeholders in OTS-based software project, developer and acquirer, and also their roles in decision making in make vs. buy, and in OTS selection. The respondents were 35 software developers and 34 software acquirers of Indonesian background. Then, a follow-up study involving 4 respondents was conducted to investigate differences in process perspective between both stakeholders. Our study found that for common and unique processes, both stakeholders perceive to have high and medium involvement in their stakeholder's processes. Only for detailed software design and coding, acquirer involvements in OTS-based custom software development were low. This study also found that each stakeholder perceives either themselves or both to make final decision on make vs. buy. In OTS-selection, both stakeholders agreed that developers had higher involvement. Based on the follow-up study findings, we proposed a model comparing and discussing stakeholder involvements, roles and responsibilities to reconcile these differences. A real example from the follow-up study findings was given to demonstrate the proposed model.
In Defense of Sparse Tracking: Circulant Sparse Tracker

Sparse representation has been introduced to visual tracking by finding the best target candidate with minimal reconstruction error within the particle filter framework. However, most sparse representation based trackers have high computational cost, less than promising tracking performance, and limited feature representation. To deal with the above issues, we propose a novel circulant sparse tracker (CST), which exploits circulant target templates. Because of the circulant structure property, CST has the following advantages: (1) It can refine and reduce particles using circular shifts of target templates. (2) The optimization can be efficiently solved entirely in the Fourier domain. (3) High dimensional features can be embedded into CST to significantly improve tracking performance without sacrificing much computation time. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging benchmark sequences demonstrate that CST performs better than all other sparse trackers and favorably against state-of-the-art methods.
The effects of local spatial structure on epidemiological invasions

Predicting the likely success of invasions is vitally important in ecology and especially epidemiology. Whether an organism can successfully invade and persist in the short–term is highly dependent on the spatial correlations that develop in the early stages of invasion. By modelling the correlations between individuals, we are able to understand the role of spatial heterogeneity in invasion dynamics without the need for large–scale computer simulations. Here, a natural methodology is developed for modelling the behaviour of individuals in a fixed network. This formulation is applied to the spread of a disease through a structured network to determine invasion thresholds and some statistical properties of a single epidemic.
Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing

We present a new technique, failure-oblivious computing, that enables servers to execute through memory errors without memory corruption. Our safe compiler for C inserts checks that dynamically detect invalid memory accesses. Instead of terminating or throwing an exception, the generated code simply discards invalid writes and manufactures values to return for invalid reads, enabling the server to continue its normal execution path. We have applied failure-oblivious computing to a set of widely-used servers from the Linux-based open-source computing environment. Our results show that our techniques 1) make these servers invulnerable to known security attacks that exploit memory errors, and 2) enable the servers to continue to operate successfully to service legitimate requests and satisfy the needs of their users even after attacks trigger their memory errors. We observed several reasons for this successful continued execution. When the memory errors occur in irrelevant computations, failure-oblivious computing enables the server to execute through the memory errors to continue on to execute the relevant computation. Even when the memory errors occur in relevant computations, failure-oblivious computing converts requests that trigger unanticipated and dangerous execution paths into anticipated invalid inputs, which the error-handling logic in the server rejects. Because servers tend to have small error propagation distances (localized errors in the computation for one request tend to have little or no effect on the computations for subsequent requests), redirecting reads that would otherwise cause addressing errors and discarding writes that would otherwise corrupt critical data structures (such as the call stack) localizes the effect of the memory errors, prevents addressing exceptions from terminating the computation, and enables the server to continue on to successfully process subsequent requests. The overall result is a substantial extension of the range of requests that the server can successfully process.
Real-word spelling correction using Google web 1Tn-gram data set

We present a method for correcting real-word spelling errors using the Google Web 1T n-gram data set and a normalized and modified version of the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) string matching algorithm. Our method is focused mainly on how to improve the correction recall (the fraction of errors corrected) while keeping the correction precision (the fraction of suggestions that are correct) as high as possible. Evaluation results on a standard data set show that our method performs very well.
Ligand-Mediated Endocytosis and Trafficking of the Insulin-Like Growth Factor Receptor I and Insulin Receptor Modulate Receptor Function

The insulin-like growth factor system and its two major receptors, the IGF receptor I (IGF-IR) and IR, plays a central role in a variety of physiological cellular processes including growth, differentiation, motility, and glucose homeostasis. The IGF-IR is also essential for tumorigenesis through its capacity to protect cancer cells from apoptosis. The IR is expressed in two isoforms: the IR isoform A (IR-A) and isoform B (IR-B). While the role of the IR-B in the regulation of metabolic effects has been known for several years, more recent evidence suggests that the IR, and in particular the IR-A, may be involved in the pathogenesis of cancer. Ligand-mediated endocytosis of tyrosine-kinases receptors plays a critical role in modulating the duration and intensity of receptors action but while the signaling pathways induced by the IGF-IR and IR are quite characterized, very little is still known about the mechanisms and proteins that regulate ligand-induced IGF-IR and IR endocytosis and trafficking. In addition, how these processes affect receptor downstream signaling has not been fully characterized. Here, we discuss the current understanding of the mechanisms and proteins regulating IGF-IR and IR endocytosis and sorting and their implications in modulating ligand-induced biological responses.
Numerical Simulation of Transient Flow Inside Nozzle on Gasoline Direct Injection Engine

To achieve transient flow characteristics at exit of nozzle orifice on gasoline direct injection engine, two phase Euler-Euler schemes was used to simulate the internal flow of the swirl nozzle. Different flow characteristics were calculated in the simulation. Different kinds of nozzle configuration were studied. Cavitaion and swirl flow occured in the nozzles. Injection hole configuration matters more than area variation of swirl tangential slot to discharge coefficient of the studied nozzle. Discharge coefficient changes a little along the injection hole length. The area of the swirl tangrntial slot plays an important throttling action in nozzle internal flow. Smaller area of swirl tangential slot generates larger degree cavitation but smaller mean injection velocity. Turbulence kinetic energy changes with the time of cavitation and swirl field occurring and the nozzle configuration. Before the appearance of cavitation, smaller inclination angle of orifice can generate more turbulence kinetic energy. After that moment, turbulence kinetic energy varies with different configuration. Along injection hole length, turbulence kinetic energy obviously varies. These flow characteristics affect primary atomization and will be as input for next spray simulation. They are also applied to design reference for injection nozzle.
Genome-wide association study for fatty acid composition in Japanese Black cattle.

Fatty acid composition is one of the important traits in beef. The aim of this study was to identify candidate genomic regions for fatty acid composition by genome-wide association study with 50 K single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array in Japanese Black cattle. A total of 461 individuals and 40 657 SNPs were used in this study. We applied genome-wide rapid association using mixed model and regression (GRAMMAR) and genomic control approaches to estimate the associations between genotypes and fatty acid composition. In addition, two SNPs in fatty acid synthase (FASN) (T1952A) and stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) (V293A) genes were also genotyped. Association analysis revealed that 30 significant SNPs for several fatty acids (C14:0, C14:1, C16:1 and C18:1) were located in the BTA19 FASN gene located within this region but the FASN mutation had no significant effect on any traits. We also detected one significant SNP for C18:1 on BTA23 and two SNPs for C16:0 on BTA25. The region around 17 Mb on BTA26 harbored two significant SNPs for C14:1 and SNP in SCD in this region showed the strongest association with C14:1. This study demonstrated novel candidate regions in BTA19, 23 and 25 for fatty acid composition.
Successful Shortening of Tuberculosis Treatment Using Adjuvant Host-Directed Therapy with FDA-Approved Phosphodiesterase Inhibitors in the Mouse Model

Global control of tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease that claims nearly 2 million lives annually, is hindered by the long duration of chemotherapy required for curative treatment. Lack of adherence to this intense treatment regimen leads to poor patient outcomes, development of new or additional drug resistance, and continued spread of M.tb. within communities. Hence, shortening the duration of TB therapy could increase drug adherence and cure in TB patients. Here, we report that addition of the United Stated Food and Drug Administration-approved phosphodiesterase inhibitors (PDE-Is) cilostazol and sildenafil to the standard TB treatment regimen reduces tissue pathology, leads to faster bacterial clearance and shortens the time to lung sterilization by one month, compared to standard treatment alone, in a murine model of TB. Our data suggest that these PDE-Is could be repurposed for use as adjunctive drugs to shorten TB treatment in humans.
Decomposition numbers for finite Coxeter groups and generalised non-crossing partitions

Given a finite irreducible Coxeter group W, a positive integer d, and types T 1 , T 2 ,. ,T d (in the sense of the classification of finite Coxeter groups), we compute the number of decompositions c = σ 1 σ 2 ···σ d of a Coxeter element c of W, such that σ i is a Coxeter element in a subgroup of type T i in W, i = 1, 2,. , d, and such that the factorisation is "minimal" in the sense that the sum of the ranks of the T i 's, i = 1,2,. , d, equals the rank of W. For the exceptional types, these decomposition numbers have been computed by the first author in ["tropics in Discrete Mathematics," M. Klazar et al. (eds.), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, New York, 2006, pp. 93-126] and [Seminaire Lotharingien Combin. 54 (2006), Article B541]. The type A n decomposition numbers have been computed by Goulden and Jackson in [Europ. J. Combin. 13 (1992), 357-365], albeit using a somewhat different language. We explain how to extract the type B n decomposition numbers from results of Bona, Bousquet, Labelle and Leroux [Adv. Appl. Math. 24 (2000), 22-56] on map enumeration. Our formula for the type D n decomposition numbers is new. These results are then used to determine, for a fixed positive integer l and fixed integers r 1 ≤ r 2 ≤ ··· ≤ r l , the number of multi-chains π 1 < π 2 ≤ ··· < π l in Armstrong's generalised non-crossing partitions poset, where the poset rank of π i equals r i and where the "block structure" of π 1 is prescribed. We demonstrate that this result implies all known enumerative results on ordinary and generalised non-crossing partitions via appropriate summations. Surprisingly, this result on multi-chain enumeration is new even for the original non-crossing partitions of Kreweras. Moreover, the result allows one to solve the problem of rank-selected chain enumeration in the type D n generalised non-crossing partitions poset, which, in turn, leads to a proof of Armstrong's F = M Conjecture in type D n , thus completing a computational proof of the F = M Conjecture for all types. It also allows one to address another conjecture of Armstrong on maximal intervals containing a random multi-chain in the generalised non-crossing partitions poset.
On the Performance Limits of Scalar Coding Over MISO Channels

The performance limits of scalar coding for multiple-input single-output channels are revisited in this work. By employing randomized beamforming, Narula et al. demonstrated that the loss of scalar coding is universally bounded by ~ 2.51 dB (or 0.833 bits/symbol) for any number of antennas and channel gains. In this work, by using randomized beamforming in conjunction with space-time codes, it is shown that the bound can be tightened to ~ 1.1 dB (or 0.39 bits/symbol).
Thermal conductivity of plastic foams

A simple equation enabling the prediction of the thermal conductivity of plastic foams, without the aid of adjustable parameters, is proposed. The equation is based on a recurrent method, previously developed, that showed reasonable agreement with experimental results. Ways of decreasing the thermal radiation contribution are shown. In particular, the influence of cell size, radiation transmission through solid membranes, and low-emissivity boundary surfaces are analyzed. Errors involved in steady techniques of measuring the thermal conductivity associated with radiation are discussed.
Skeletal Muscle Metaboreceptor Exercise Responses Are Attenuated in Heart Failure

Background Resting sympathetic nervous system activity is increased in heart failure. Whether sympathetic nervous system responses during exercise are increased is controversial. Futhermore, the role of muscle metaboreceptors and central command in regulating sympa-thetic outflow has been largely unexplored. Methods and Results Muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA, peroneal nerve) was measured in nine heart failure subjects and eight age-matched control subjects during static exercise (30%o maximal voluntary contraction) for 2 minutes and during a period of posthand-grip regional circulatory arrest. This maneuver isolates the metaboreceptor contribution to sympathetic nervous system responses. MSNA responses were similar during static exercise in the two groups. During posthandgrip regional circulatory arrest we observed a marked attenuation in MSNA responses in the heart failure subjects (15% increase in heart failure versus 57% increase in control subjects). A cold pressor test demonstrated a normal MSNA response to a potent nonspecific stimulus in the heart failure subjects (heart failure subjects, 141% increase; control subjects, 215% increase; NS). Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy studies in five separate heart failure subjects and five control subjects suggested that the attenuated metaboreceptor response in heart failure was not due to reduced H+ production. Conclusions Skeletal muscle metaboreceptor responses are impaired in heart failure. Because MSNA responses during static exercise are similar in the two groups, mechanisms aside from metaboreceptor stimulation must be important in increasing sympathetic nervous system activity.