Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Feasibility of Canine Rabies Elimination in Africa: Dispelling Doubts with Data

Background Canine rabies causes many thousands of human deaths every year in Africa, and continues to increase throughout much of the continent. Methodology/Principal Findings This paper identifies four common reasons given for the lack of effective canine rabies control in Africa: (a) a low priority given for disease control as a result of lack of awareness of the rabies burden; (b) epidemiological constraints such as uncertainties about the required levels of vaccination coverage and the possibility of sustained cycles of infection in wildlife; (c) operational constraints including accessibility of dogs for vaccination and insufficient knowledge of dog population sizes for planning of vaccination campaigns; and (d) limited resources for implementation of rabies surveillance and control. We address each of these issues in turn, presenting data from field studies and modelling approaches used in Tanzania, including burden of disease evaluations, detailed epidemiological studies, operational data from vaccination campaigns in different demographic and ecological settings, and economic analyses of the cost-effectiveness of dog vaccination for human rabies prevention. Conclusions/Significance We conclude that there are no insurmountable problems to canine rabies control in most of Africa; that elimination of canine rabies is epidemiologically and practically feasible through mass vaccination of domestic dogs; and that domestic dog vaccination provides a cost-effective approach to the prevention and elimination of human rabies deaths.
Vortices in a Bose Einstein condensate

Summary form only given. Since the first observations of Bose Einstein condensates (BEC) in dilute atomic gases, there has been considerable interest in observing effects in atomic BEC akin to the hallmark effects associated with a superfluid, in particular persistent, quantized circulation of the fluid. Using a method proposed by Williams and Holland' we have prepared vortices, macroscopic quantum states with quantized angular momentum, in a trapped BEC of /sup 87/Rb. The experimental realization of this method takes advantage of unique features of the time averaged orbiting potential (TOP) trap and builds on earlier work involving two-component condensates. The two components refer to two different internal hyperfine states of /sup 87/Rb, confined by identical and fully overlapping magnetic trap potentials in these experiments.
Silicon-Organic Hybrid (SOH) and Plasmonic-Organic Hybrid (POH) Integration

Silicon photonics offers tremendous potential for inexpensive high-yield photonic-electronic integration. Besides conventional dielectric waveguides, plasmonic structures can also be efficiently realized on the silicon photonic platform, reducing device footprint by more than an order of magnitude. However, neither silicon nor metals exhibit appreciable second-order optical nonlinearities, thereby making efficient electro-optic modulators challenging to realize. These deficiencies can be overcome by the concepts of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonic-organic hybrid integration, which combine SOI waveguides and plasmonic nanostructures with organic electro-optic cladding materials.
IRAP-Rab 14 Endosomes for Efficient Conventional Dendritic Cells Require

Dendritic cells (DCs) use cellular pathways collectively referred to as cross-presentation to stimulate CD8 + T cells with peptide Ags derived from internalized, exogenous Ags. We have recently reported that DCs rely on aminoterminal trimming of cross-presented peptides by insulin-responsive aminopeptidase (IRAP), an enzyme localized in a regulated endosomal storage compartment. Considering a report contending that this role is limited to inflammatory DCs (Segura et al. in this study, we examined the role of IRAP in steady-state DC subpopulations. Steady-state conventional DCs (cDCs) and plasmacytoid DCs expressed similar amounts of IRAP. IRAP colocalized with the endosomal markers Rab14 and syntaxin 6, both known to be associated with regulated endosomal storage compartments, in CD8 + and CD8 2 cDCs—however, to a greater extent in the former population. Likewise, IRAP recruitment to phagosomes was significantly stronger in CD8 + DCs. IRAP deficiency compromised cross-presentation of soluble and particulate Ag by both CD8 + and CD8 2 cDCs, again with a stronger effect in the former population. Thus, the requirement of IRAP in cross-presentation extends to steady-state cDCs. Moreover, these data suggest that increased recruitment of an IRAP + /Rab14 + compartment to Ag-containing vesicles contributes to the superior cross-presentation efficacy of CD8 + cDCs. D endritic cells (DCs) have a pivotal role in the orchestration of adaptive immune responses. All aspects of the adaptive immune response—T cell priming and activation , immune tolerance, and immune memory—critically involve the presentation of cognate Ag (1). Like most cells of the body, DCs can present endogenously synthesized Ags, but unlike other cell types, DCs can cross-present exogenous Ags on MHC class I (MHC-I) molecules. Exogenous Ags are also cross-presented by macrophages, monocytes, and B cells, but the only APCs capable of activating or cross-priming naive T CD8 + cells are DCs (2). Immature DCs capture Ags by phagocytosis, pinocytosis, and receptor-mediated endocytosis. Engulfed exogenous Ag is either processed inside lysosomes or shuttled into the cytosol, where it is exposed to the proteasome. Efficient cross-presentation of most studied exogenous Ags depends on the proteasome (3). Amino-terminal trimming and loading on MHC-I of antigenic peptide precursors produced by the proteasome is believed to occur in several cellular compartments. Historically, it was first proposed that loading of MHC-I with cross-presented epitopes occurs in the perinuclear endoplasmic reticulum (4). Consistent with this, knockout (ko) of the murine ERAP-trimming peptidase has been shown to compromise cross-presentation (5, 6). Reimport of …
Physical activity in middle school-aged children participating in a school-based recreation program.

BACKGROUND The increasing incidence of obesity in children may be attributed in part to increased sedentary behavior, such as watching television, which leads to less energy expended in physical activity. We have theorized that by middle school, many children lack the physical skills or self-confidence to participate in competitive physical activities. Thus, we hypothesized that if we provided a summer and after-school program featuring noncompetitive, outdoor activities such as gardening and adventure education, we would observe increased physical activity relative to habitual physical activities at home. METHODS To test this hypothesis, 2 experiments were conducted. In the first, 4 children aged 12 years were evaluated while they participated in a summer recreation program for 2 hours and again while they watched a videotape. They wore a uniaxial accelerometer to assess physical movement, and we used a bicarbonate labeled with 13C tracer technique to assess energy expenditure. In a second experiment, we evaluated 8 children (aged 10-12 years) twice using uniaxial accelerometry only, once while they attended the after-school program for 2 hours and then during a similar period at home. RESULTS The first study showed that the estimated energy expenditure (kilocalories. kilograms-1. hours-1) was 60% increased during the program (mean +/- SD) (2.6 +/- 0.5) compared with watching a videotape (1.6 +/- 0.3) (P =.02). Physical movement (accelerations per minute) also was significantly increased (3959 +/- 896 vs 513 +/- 182) (P =.004). In the second experiment, movement was 95% increased during the program (4578 +/- 1004) compared with the behavior at home (2345 +/- 746) (P =.005). CONCLUSION These results show that an organized, noncompetitive, leisure-time program can increase physical activity in children.
Lysosome Dysfunction Enhances Oxidative Stress‐Induced Apoptosis through Ubiquitinated Protein Accumulation in Hela Cells

The role of lysosomal system in oxidative stress‐induced apoptosis in cancer cells is not fully understood. Menadione is frequently used as oxidative stress model. It is indicated that menadione could induce autophagy in Hela cells. In the present study, we examined whether the lysosomal inhibitor, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) could prevent the autophagy flux by inhibiting the fusion of autophagosomes with lysosomes and enhance apoptosis induced by menadione via mitochondrial pathway. The results demonstrated generation and accumulation of reactive oxygen species and increased levels of ubiquitinated proteins and GRP78 in cells treated with both menadione and NH4Cl. Our data indicates that lysosomal system through autophagy plays an important role in preventing menadione‐induced apoptosis in Hela cells by clearing misfolded proteins, which alleviates endoplasmic reticulum stress. Anat Rec, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Performance analysis of memory transfers and GEMM subroutines on NVIDIA Tesla GPU cluster

Commodity clusters augmented with application accelerators are evolving as competitive high performance computing systems. The Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) with a very high arithmetic density and performance per price ratio is a good platform for the scientific application acceleration. In addition to the interconnect bottlenecks among the cluster compute nodes, the cost of memory copies between the host and the GPU device have to be carefully amortized to improve the overall efficiency of the application. Scientific applications also rely on efficient implementation of the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS), among which the General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) is considered as the workhorse subroutine. In this paper, we study the performance of the memory copies and GEMM subroutines that are crucial to port the computational chemistry algorithms to the GPU clusters. To that end, a benchmark based on the NetPIPE [1] framework is developed to evaluate the latency and bandwidth of the memory copies between the host and the GPU device. The performance of the single and double precision GEMM subroutines from the NVIDIA CUBLAS 2.0 library are studied. The results have been compared with that of the BLAS routines from the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) to understand the computational trade-offs. The test bed is a Intel Xeon cluster equipped with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.
Fast Recovery Paths: Reducing Packet Loss Rates during IP Routing Convergence

In high speed IP networks, interior gateway protocols, like OSPF, cannot obtain a new route to bypass a failure in time. These protocols' convergence period can vary from hundreds of milliseconds to tens of seconds. During this time there is instability, causing high packet loss rates. This study proposes a proactive approach of fast recovery paths to aid OSPF bypass failures. An evaluation of these paths was conducted, which showed the recovery paths are shorter than other similar approaches and they significantly reduce the packet loss rate during the OSPF convergence period caused by a failure.
Emotion Dysregulation Mediates the Relation between Mindfulness and Rejection Sensitivity.

BACKGROUND The role of rejection sensitivity (RS; the tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to implied or overt interpersonal rejection) in psychopathology has mainly been studied with regard to borderline personality disorder (BPD). In the present study, we first sought to extend previous evidence of heightened RS in a clinical group with psychiatric disorders other than BPD, when compared with a community sample. Then, we tested whether emotion dysregulation and mindfulness were associated with RS in both sample, further hypothesizing that emotion dysregulation would mediate the relation between mindfulness deficits and RS. SUBJECTS AND METHODS We adopted a cross-sectional design involving 191 psychiatric patients and 277 community participants (total N=468). All participants completed the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire, the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. RESULTS Our hypotheses were supported, with psychiatric patients reporting greater levels of rejection sensitivity and emotion dysregulation, and lower level of mindfulness. Mindfulness deficits and emotion dysregulation explained a significant amount of variance in RS, in both samples. Finally, bootstrap analyses revealed that mindfulness deficits played an indirect effect on RS through the mediating role of emotion dysregulation. In particular, two different patterns emerged. Among psychiatric patients, an impairment in the ability to assume a non-judgmental stance towards own thoughts and feelings was related to RS through the mediation of limited access to emotion regulation strategies. Conversely, in the community sample, overall emotion dysregulation mediated the effect of lack of attention and awareness for present activities and experience on RS. CONCLUSIONS Longitudinal studies could help in delineating etiological models of RS, and the joint role of deficits in mindfulness and emotion regulation should inform treatment programs.
Mobility-based Candidate Selection and Coordination in Opportunistic Routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) is an effective and enhanced routing scheme for wireless multihop environment. OR is an approach that selects a certain number of best forwarders (candidates) at each hop by taking the advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium to reach the destination. When a set of candidates receive the packet, they coordinate with each other to figure out which one has to forward the packet toward the destination. Most of the research in this area has been done in mesh networks where nodes do not have mobility. In this survey, we propose a new OR protocol for mobile ad hoc scenarios called as Enhanced Mobility-based Opportunistic Routing (EMOR) protocol. To deal with the node mobility, we have proposed a new metric which considers the following: geographical position of the candidates; the link delivery probability to reach them; the number of neighboring nodes of candidates; and the predicted position of nodes using the motion vector of the nodes. We have compared EMOR with five other well-known routing protocols in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and expected number of transmissions from source to the destination. Our simulation results show that proposed protocol improves delivery ratio and number of expected transmission in terms of different type of mobility models.
Veröffentlichungsreihe des Forschungsschwerpunktes

This paper discusses a set of propositions about the impact of the mass media on modern government and politics in the west. Because the literature, though voluminous, is inconclusive and controversial, the propositions are presented as aseries of contradictory p~irs. The intention is not necessarily to resolve the contradictions, though this is possible in some cases, but to review the literature in a systematic way. The propositions are grouped under seven headings the nature of politics; citizens and political Iife; elections; political elites; political parties; governments; contemporary democracy; globalization of information. When the argument and evidence is organised this way the general conclusion seems to be that media impacts are strongest when they are closest to the news media output themselves (the editorial room and news room) and weakest at the more general levels of institutions, the democratic system, and the global system.
Recent Approaches To Optimize Laboratory Assessment of Antinuclear Antibodies

ABSTRACT The presence of antinuclear antibodies (ANAs) is a hallmark of a number of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases, and testing is usually performed as part of the initial diagnostic workup when suspicion of an underlying autoimmune disorder is high. The indirect immunofluorescence antibody (IFA) technique is the preferred method for detecting ANAs, as it demonstrates binding to specific intracellular structures within the cells, resulting in a number of staining patterns that are usually categorized based on the cellular components recognized and the degree of binding, as reflected by the fluorescence intensity or titer. As a screening tool, the ANA patterns can guide confirmatory testing useful in elucidating a specific clinical diagnosis or prognosis. However, routine use of ANA IFA testing as a global screening test is hampered by its labor-intensiveness, subjectivity, and limited diagnostic specificity, among other factors. This review focuses on current efforts to standardize the nomenclature of ANA patterns and on alternative methods for ANA determination, as well as on recent advances in image-based computer algorithms to automate IFA testing in clinical laboratories.
E-Commerce: A Study on Online Shopping in Malaysia

Abstract Despite the high potential of online shopping in Malaysia, there is still a lack of understanding concerning the subject matter and its potential impact on consumer marketing. This study aims to establish a preliminary assessment, evaluation and understanding of the characteristics of online shopping in Malaysia. The Chisquire test was used to determine the relationship between current online shoppers and demographic variables. Samples t-test was then used to compare the mean differences between current online shoppers and non-online shoppers. Then, correlation coefficient matrix was employed to determine the degree of correlation between future online shopping and issues concerning online shopping. The study revealed that online shopping in Malaysia is significantly associated with the Chinese ethnic group, university degree holders and credit cards or chequebooks owners. The results also indicated a significant mean difference between online shoppers and non-online shoppers in gathering product information and comparing price of goods and services before a purchase decision. Results also indicate that this group of non-online shoppers constitutes more than 60% of the total number of online consumers in Malaysia, implying a huge potential of online shopping to online retailers. In conclusion, online consumers in Malaysia still lack confidence and trust in utilizing the Internet as a shopping channel. They are mainly concerned about issues related to privacy and trust when dealing with online retailers. These issues, if left unchecked, will have a detrimental effect on the future growth of online shopping in Malaysia.
Design and Management of Complex Technical Processes and Systems by Means of Computational Intelligence Methods Runtime Analysis of Binary Pso Runtime Analysis of Binary Pso *

We investigate the runtime of the Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm introduced by Kennedy and Eberhart (1997). The Binary PSO maintains a global best solution and a swarm of particles. Each particle consists of a current position, an own best position and a velocity vector used in a probabilistic process to update the particle's position. We present lower bounds for a broad class of implementations with swarms of polynomial size. To prove upper bounds, we transfer a fitness-level argument well-established for evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to PSO. This method is then applied to estimate the expected runtime on the class of unimodal functions. A simple variant of the Binary PSO is considered in more detail. The 1-PSO only maintains one particle, hence own best and global best solutions coincide. Despite its simplicity, the 1-PSO is surprisingly efficient. A detailed analysis for the function OneMax shows that the 1-PSO is competitive to EAs.
Adaptive color demosaicing and false color removal

Color interpolation solutions drastically influence the quality of the whole image generation pipeline, so they must guar- antee the rendering of high quality pictures by avoiding typical arti- facts such as blurring, zipper effects, and false colors. Moreover, demosaicing should avoid emphasizing typical artifacts of real sen- sors data, such as noise and green imbalance effect, which would be further accentuated by the subsequent steps of the processing pipeline. We propose a new adaptive algorithm that decides the interpolation technique to apply to each pixel, according to its neigh- borhood analysis. Edges are effectively interpolated through a direc- tional filtering approach that interpolates the missing colors, select- ing the suitable filter depending on edge orientation. Regions close to edges are interpolated through a simpler demosaicing approach. Thus flat regions are identified and low-pass filtered to eliminate some residual noise and to minimize the annoying green imbalance effect. Finally, an effective false color removal algorithm is used as a postprocessing step to eliminate residual color errors. The experi- mental results show how sharp edges are preserved, whereas un- desired zipper effects are reduced, improving the edge resolution itself and obtaining superior image quality. © 2010 SPIE and
Five-year outcomes of a randomized phase III trial comparing adjuvant chemotherapy with S-1 versus surgery alone in stage II or III gastric cancer.

PURPOSE The first planned interim analysis (median follow-up, 3 years) of the Adjuvant Chemotherapy Trial of S-1 for Gastric Cancer confirmed that the oral fluoropyrimidine derivative S-1 significantly improved overall survival, the primary end point. The results were therefore opened at the recommendation of an independent data and safety monitoring committee. We report 5-year follow-up data on patients enrolled onto the ACTS-GC study. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with histologically confirmed stage II or III gastric cancer who underwent gastrectomy with D2 lymphadenectomy were randomly assigned to receive S-1 after surgery or surgery only. S-1 (80 to 120 mg per day) was given for 4 weeks, followed by 2 weeks of rest. This 6-week cycle was repeated for 1 year. The primary end point was overall survival, and the secondary end points were relapse-free survival and safety. RESULTS The overall survival rate at 5 years was 71.7% in the S-1 group and 61.1% in the surgery-only group (hazard ratio [HR], 0.669; 95% CI, 0.540 to 0.828). The relapse-free survival rate at 5 years was 65.4% in the S-1 group and 53.1% in the surgery-only group (HR, 0.653; 95% CI, 0.537 to 0.793). Subgroup analyses according to principal demographic factors such as sex, age, disease stage, and histologic type showed no interaction between treatment and any characteristic. CONCLUSION On the basis of 5-year follow-up data, postoperative adjuvant therapy with S-1 was confirmed to improve overall survival and relapse-free survival in patients with stage II or III gastric cancer who had undergone D2 gastrectomy.
An Amalgam Approach using AES and RC4 Algorithms for Encryption and Decryption

This paper aims at developing a new hybrid cipher by combining the characteristics of two ciphers namely AES(Advanced Encryption Standard) and Rc4(also known as ARC4). The characteristics of both the ciphers are studied and a new cipher combining the characteristics of both the ciphers is generated which is more secure than the original ciphers. AES characteristics are its security and its resistance against attacks and the major characteristic of Rc4 is its speed. Therefore these characteristics are imbibed in the newly generated cipher. Thus it proves to be faster than the original AES and secure against most attacks. Three combination techniques have been formulated to generate a hybridized cipher and the procedure along with the strengths and weaknesses outlined. The third cipher is the major cipher which is focussed on in this paper. It is also shown that this cipher is resistant against most attacks. This will ensure the secrecy and confidentially of the messages it is used to encrypt. General Terms Hybrid, higher security, speed improvement, combination of ciphers, confidentiality, encryption, decryption.