Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of nickel on a marine bacterium, Arthrobacter marinus sp.nov.

SUMMARY: An unbalanced growth situation, resulting in large, plasmolysed sphero-plasts (megalomorphs) produced by the addition of nickel to the growth medium of a marine bacterium, Arthrobacter marinus sp.nov., is described. The effect of increasing nickel concentrations was gradual. Under the cultural conditions used, a slight effect was noted on size in 1 x 10-4M-NiCl2, but in 4 x 10-4M-NiCl2 the cells formed megalomorphs attaining a size of 10 to 15 μm. Cell division did not occur in 5 x 10-4M-nickel. The lag phase of the culture increased from about 3 h. without added nickel to more than 70 h. at 4 x 10-4M-nickel. Concurrently, the maximum population decreased as the nickel concentration was increased. The classification of the marine bacterium is described and the organism is designated as A. marinus sp.nov.
Neural Correlates of Phrase Rhythm: An EEG Study of Bipartite vs. Rondo Sonata Form

This paper introduces the neural correlates of phrase rhythm. In short, phrase rhythm is the rhythmic aspect of phrase construction and the relationships between phrases. For the sake of establishing the neural correlates, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to phrase rhythm. Brain activity is monitored through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain–computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. Our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands in the phrase rhythm variations of two classical sonatas, one in bipartite form and the other in rondo form.
Subduction of Decadal North Pacific Temperature Anomalies: Observations and Dynamics

Abstract Observations of oceanic temperature in the upper 400 m reveal decadal signals that propagate in the thermocline along lines of constant potential vorticity from the ventilation region in the central North Pacific to approximately 18°N in the western Pacific. The propagation path and speed are well described by the geostrophic mean circulation and by a model of the ventilated thermocline. The approximate southward speed of the thermal signal of 7 mm s−1 yields a transit time of approximately eight years. The thermal anomalies appear to be forced by perturbations of the mixed layer heat budget in the subduction region of the central North Pacific east of the date line. A warm pulse was generated in the central North Pacific by a series of mild winters from 1973 to 1976 and reached 18°N around 1982. After 1978 a succession of colder winters initiated a cold anomaly in the central North Pacific that propagated along a similar path and with a similar speed as the warm anomaly, then arrived in the west.
Type 2 Diabetes and Heart Failure: Challenges and Solutions

Increasing numbers of older patients with type 2 diabetes, and their improved survival from cardiovascular events is seeing a massive increase in patients with both diabetes and heart failure. Already, at least a third of all patients with heart failure have diabetes. This close association is partly because all the major risk factors for heart failure also cluster in patients with type 2 diabetes, including obesity, hypertension, advanced age, sleep apnoea, dyslipidaemia, anaemia, chronic kidney disease, and coronary heart disease. However, diabetes may also cause cardiac dysfunction in the absence of overt macrovascular disease, as well as complicate the response to therapy. Current management is focused on targeting modifiable risk factors for heart failure including hyperglycaemia, dyslipidaemia, hypertension, obesity and anemia. But although these are important risk markers, none of these interventions substantially prevents heart failure or improves its outcomes. Much more needs to be done to focus on this issue, including the inclusion of hospital admission for heart failure as a pre-specified component of the primary composite cardiovascular outcomes and new trials in heart failure management specifically in the context of diabetes.
Identifying Top-k Structural Hole Spanners in Large-Scale Social Networks

Recent studies have shown that in social networks, users who bridge different communities, known as structural hole spanners, have great potentials to acquire available resources from these communities and gain access to multiple sources of information flow. Structural hole spanners are crucial in many applications such as community detections, diffusion controls, and viral marketing. In spite of their importance, not much attention has been paid to them. Particularly, how to characterize the structural hole spanner properties and how to devise efficient yet scalable algorithms to find them are fundamental issues. In this paper, we formulate the problem as the top-k structural hole spanner problem. Specifically, we first provide a generic model to measure the quality of structural hole spanners, by exploring their properties, and show that the problem is NP-hard. We then devise efficient and scalable algorithms, by exploiting the bounded inverse closeness centralities of vertices and making use of articulation points of the network. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can capture the characteristics of structural hole spanners accurately, and the proposed algorithms are very promising.
Overview of Nrf2 as Therapeutic Target in Epilepsy

Oxidative stress is a biochemical state of imbalance in the production of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species and antioxidant defenses. It is involved in the physiopathology of degenerative and chronic neuronal disorders, such as epilepsy. Experimental evidence in humans and animals support the involvement of oxidative stress before and after seizures. In the past few years, research has increasingly focused on the molecular pathways of this process, such as that involving transcription factor nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2), which plays a central role in the regulation of antioxidant response elements (ARE) and modulates cellular redox status. The aim of this review is to present experimental evidence on the role of Nrf2 in this neurological disorder and to further determine the therapeutic impact of Nrf2 in epilepsy.
Comparing Multispectral Image Fusion Methods for a Target Detection Task

With the advance in multispectral imaging, image fusion has emerged as a new and important research area. Many studies have examined human performance with specific fusion methods, over the individual input bands; yet few comparison studies have been conducted to examine which fusion method is preferable over another. This paper presents four different fusion methods, average, false color (FC), principal component analysis (PCA), or edge enhancement (EE), for multispectral imaging and their impact on human observers' performance. In our experiment, images with multiple targets were presented to 56 participants performing a target detection task. Quantitative measurements of participants' hit accuracy and reaction time were measured. Results yielded an overall superior performance in target detection with the false color and principal components analysis compared with the average and edge enhancement fusion methods
Coral Reef Disturbance and Recovery Dynamics Differ across Gradients of Localized Stressors in the Mariana Islands

The individual contribution of natural disturbances, localized stressors, and environmental regimes upon longer-term reef dynamics remains poorly resolved for many locales despite its significance for management. This study examined coral reefs in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands across a 12-year period that included elevated Crown-of-Thorns Starfish densities (COTS) and tropical storms that were drivers of spatially-inconsistent disturbance and recovery patterns. At the island scale, disturbance impacts were highest on Saipan with reduced fish sizes, grazing urchins, and water quality, despite having a more favorable geological foundation for coral growth compared with Rota. However, individual drivers of reef dynamics were better quantified through site-level investigations that built upon island generalizations. While COTS densities were the strongest predictors of coral decline as expected, interactive terms that included wave exposure and size of the overall fish assemblages improved models (R2 and AIC values). Both wave exposure and fish size diminished disturbance impacts and had negative associations with COTS. However, contrasting findings emerged when examining net ecological change across the 12-year period. Wave exposure had a ubiquitous, positive influence upon the net change in favorable benthic substrates (i.e. corals and other heavily calcifying substrates, R2 = 0.17 for all reeftypes grouped), yet including interactive terms for herbivore size and grazing urchin densities, as well as stratifying by major reeftypes, substantially improved models (R2 = 0.21 to 0.89, lower AIC scores). Net changes in coral assemblages (i.e., coral ordination scores) were more sensitive to herbivore size or the water quality proxy acting independently (R2 = 0.28 to 0.44). We conclude that COTS densities were the strongest drivers of coral decline, however, net ecological change was most influenced by localized stressors, especially herbivore sizes and grazing urchin densities. Interestingly, fish size, rather than biomass, was consistently a better predictor, supporting allometric, size-and-function relationships of fish assemblages. Management implications are discussed.
Work-related injuries among physiotherapists in public hospitals—a Southeast Asian picture

OBJECTIVES: A cross-sectional study was conducted to measure the prevalence of work-related injuries among physiotherapists in Malaysia and to explore the influence of factors such as gender, body mass index, years of work experience and clinical placement areas on the occurrence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. METHODS: Self-administered questionnaires adapted from the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire were sent to 105 physiotherapists at three main public hospitals in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The questionnaire had 12 items that covered demographic information, areas of musculoskeletal problems and physiotherapy techniques that could contribute to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. The data obtained were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science version 14 software. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of work-related injuries during the past 12 months was 71.6%. Female therapists reported a significantly higher prevalence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders than the male therapists (73.0%, p<0.001). Significant differences were observed between the proportion of therapists who had work-related musculoskeletal disorders and those who did not for the group with a body mass index (BMI) >25 (χ2 = 9.0, p = 0.003) and the group with a BMI of 18–25 (χ2 = 7.8, p = 0.006). Manual therapy (58.6%) and lifting/transfer tasks (41.3%) were the two physiotherapy techniques that most often contributed to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. CONCLUSION: Work-related injuries are significantly higher among the physiotherapists in Malaysia compared with many other countries. Female therapists reported a higher incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders in this study, and work-related musculoskeletal disorders were more common among therapists working in the pediatric specialty. This study contributes to the understanding of work-related disorders among physiotherapists from a southeast Asian perspective where the profession is in its development stage.
MDE‐based process tailoring strategy

Defining organizational software processes is essential for enhancing maturity because they cannot be improved if they are not specified. However, software process definition is hard and still not good for assuring productivity because the best process depends on the project's particularities. The process engineer can define a specific process for each kind of project, but this is expensive, unrepeatable, and error prone. Moreover, it is difficult to foresee all project scenarios and therefore the appropriate processes. The most usual situation is to apply always the same software process, although it is known to be suboptimal. To deal with this challenge, we propose a model‐based approach to software process tailoring that automatically generates project‐specific processes on the basis of the organizational process and project contexts. We still require competent process engineers to define the company's process, but once done, our approach is systematic, repeatable, and easy to use. The proposal is applied for tailoring the requirements engineering process of a medium‐size Chilean company. Processes obtained matched those used in the company for planned project contexts, and they were also reasonable for nonexpected situations. The company's process and project engineers agreed that the approach was highly valuable. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Analytical Model for Voltage-Dependent Photo and Dark Currents in Bulk Heterojunction Organic Solar Cells

A physics-based explicit mathematical model for the external voltage-dependent forward dark current in bulk heterojunction (BHJ) organic solar cells is developed by considering Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) recombination and solving the continuity equations for both electrons and holes. An analytical model for the external voltage-dependent photocurrent in BHJ organic solar cells is also proposed by incorporating exponential photon absorption, dissociation efficiency of bound electron-hole pairs (EHPs), carrier trapping, and carrier drift and diffusion in the photon absorption layer. Modified Braun’s model is used to compute the electric field-dependent dissociation efficiency of the bound EHPs. The overall net current is calculated considering the actual solar spectrum. The mathematical models are verified by comparing the model calculations with various published experimental results. We analyze the effects of the contact properties, blend compositions, charge carrier transport properties (carrier mobility and lifetime), and cell design on the current-voltage characteristics. The power conversion efficiency of BHJ organic solar cells mostly depends on electron transport properties of the acceptor layer. The results of this paper indicate that improvement of charge carrier transport (both mobility and lifetime) and dissociation of bound EHPs in organic blend are critically important to increase the power conversion efficiency of the BHJ solar cells.
Tarzan: a peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer

Tarzan is a peer-to-peer anonymous IP network overlay. Because it provides IP service, Tarzan is general-purpose and transparent to applications. Organized as a decentralized peer-to-peer overlay, Tarzan is fault-tolerant, highly scalable, and easy to manage.Tarzan achieves its anonymity with layered encryption and multi-hop routing, much like a Chaumian mix. A message initiator chooses a path of peers pseudo-randomly through a restricted topology in a way that adversaries cannot easily influence. Cover traffic prevents a global observer from using traffic analysis to identify an initiator. Protocols toward unbiased peer-selection offer new directions for distributing trust among untrusted entities.Tarzan provides anonymity to either clients or servers, without requiring that both participate. In both cases, Tarzan uses a network address translator (NAT) to bridge between Tarzan hosts and oblivious Internet hosts.Measurements show that Tarzan imposes minimal overhead over a corresponding non-anonymous overlay route.
Techniques for Bundling the Solution Space of Finite Constraint Satisfaction Problems

We study the backtrack-search procedure with forward checking (FCBT) for finding all solutions to a finite Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). We describe how to use dynamic interchangeability to enhance the performance of search and represent the solution space in a compact manner. We evaluate this strategy (FC-DNPI) in terms of the numbers of nodes visited, constraints checked, and solution bundles generated by comparing it, theoretically and empirically, to other search strategies. We show that FC-DNPI is equivalent to search with the Cross Product Representation (FC-CPR) of [Hubbe and Freuder 1992] in terms of the numbers of solution bundles and constraint checks, while it reduces the number of nodes visited. We establish that both strategies are always superior to FC-BT in terms of all three criteria and dynamic bundling is always beneficial. Further, we compare FC-DNPI to the search procedure of [Haselbock 1993], which exploits static, pre-computed interchangeability relations. We show that the former never generates more solution bundles nor expands more nodes than the latter, and often reduces the number of constraint checks. We also propose, without evaluating them, amendments to the strategy of [Haselbock 1993] to improve its performance and reduce the number of constraint checks.
Particular object retrieval with integral max-pooling of CNN activations

Recently, image representation built upon Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been shown to provide effective descriptors for image search, outperforming pre-CNN features as short-vector representations. Yet such models are not compatible with geometry-aware re-ranking methods and still outperformed, on some particular object retrieval benchmarks, by traditional image search systems relying on precise descriptor matching, geometric re-ranking, or query expansion. This work revisits both retrieval stages, namely initial search and re-ranking, by employing the same primitive information derived from the CNN. We build compact feature vectors that encode several image regions without the need to feed multiple inputs to the network. Furthermore, we extend integral images to handle max-pooling on convolutional layer activations, allowing us to efficiently localize matching objects. The resulting bounding box is finally used for image re-ranking. As a result, this paper significantly improves existing CNN-based recognition pipeline: We report for the first time results competing with traditional methods on the challenging Oxford5k and Paris6k datasets.
MIMICRY ON THE QT(L): GENETICS OF SPECIATION IN MIMULUS

Abstract Ecological studies suggest that hummingbird-pollinated plants in North America mimic each other to increase visitation by birds. Published quantitative trait locus (QTL) data for two Mimulus species indicate that floral traits associated with hummingbird versus bee pollination results from a few loci with major effects on morphology, as predicted by classical models for the evolution of mimicry. Thus, the architecture of genetic divergence associated with speciation may depend on the ecological context. Corresponding Editor: O. Savolainen
Ultraviolet-Irradiated Mice Engraftment with Bone Marrow from in the Periphery of Mice after Long-Term Altered Immunity and Dendritic Cell Activity

Alterations to dendritic cell (DC) progenitors in the bone marrow (BM) may contribute to long-lasting systemic immunosuppression ( > 28 d) following exposure of the skin of mice to erythemal UV radiation (UVR). DCs differentiated in vitro from the BM of mice 3 d after UVR (8 kJ/m 2 ) have a reduced capacity to initiate immunity (both skin and airways) when adoptively transferred into naive mice. Studies in IL-10 2 / 2 mice suggested that UV-induced IL-10 was not signiﬁcantly involved. To investigate the immune capabilities of peripheral tissue DCs generated in vivo from the BM of UV-irradiated mice, chimeric mice were established. Sixteen weeks after reconstitution, contact hypersensitivity responses were signiﬁcantly reduced in mice reconstituted with BM from UV-irradiated mice (UV-chimeric). When the dorsal skin of UV-chimeric mice was challenged with innate inﬂammatory agents, the hypertrophy induced in the draining lymph nodes was minimal and signiﬁcantly less than that measured in control-chimeric mice challenged with the same inﬂammatory agent. When DCs were differentiated from the BM of UV-chimeric mice using FLT3 ligand or GM-CSF + IL-4, the cells maintained a reduced priming ability. The diminished responses in UV-chimeric mice were not due to different numerical or proportional reconstitution of BM or the hematopoietic cells in blood, lymph nodes, and skin. Erythemal UVR may imprint a long-lasting epigenetic effect on DC progenitors in the BM and alter the function of their terminally differentiated progeny. The Journal of Immunology , 2013, 190: 000–000.
Optimized Training for Net Energy Maximization in Multi-Antenna Wireless Energy Transfer Over Frequency-Selective Channel

This paper studies the training design problem for multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless energy transfer (WET) systems in frequency-selective channels, where the frequency-diversity and energy-beamforming gains can be both reaped to maximize the transferred energy by efficiently learning the channel state information (CSI) at the energy transmitter (ET). By exploiting channel reciprocity, a new two-phase channel training scheme is proposed to achieve the diversity and beamforming gains, respectively. In the first phase, pilot signals are sent from the energy receiver (ER) over a selected subset of the available frequency sub-bands, through which the ET determines a certain number of “strongest” sub-bands with largest antenna sum-power gains and sends their indices to the ER. In the second phase, the selected sub-bands are further trained by the ER, so that the ET obtains a refined estimate of the corresponding MISO channels to implement energy beamforming for WET. A training design problem is formulated and optimally solved, which takes into account the channel training overhead by maximizing the net harvested energy at the ER, defined as the average harvested energy offset by that consumed in the two-phase training. Moreover, asymptotic analysis is obtained for systems with a large number of antennas or a large number of sub-bands to gain useful insights on the optimal training design. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme that optimally balances the diversity and beamforming gains in MISO WET systems with limited-energy training.
TCP in 5G mmWave networks: Link level retransmissions and MP-TCP

MmWave communications, one of the cornerstones of future 5G mobile networks, are characterized at the same time by a potential multi-gigabit capacity and by a very dynamic channel, sensitive to blockage, wide fluctuations in the received signal quality, and possibly also sudden link disruption. While the performance of physical and MAC layer schemes that address these issues has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, the complex interactions between mmWave links and transport layer protocols such as TCP are still relatively unexplored. This paper uses the ns-3 mmWave module, with its channel model based on real measurements in New York City, to analyze the performance of the Linux TCP/IP stack (i) with and without link-layer retransmissions, showing that they are fundamental to reach a high TCP throughput on mmWave links and (ii) with Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) over multiple LTE and mmWave links, illustrating which are the throughput-optimal combinations of secondary paths and congestion control algorithms in different conditions.