Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Big Data to Monitor the Introduction and Spread of Chikungunya, Europe, 2017

With regard to fully harvesting the potential of big data, public health lags behind other fields. To determine this potential, we applied big data (air passenger volume from international areas with active chikungunya transmission, Twitter data, and vectorial capacity estimates of Aedes albopictus mosquitoes) to the 2017 chikungunya outbreaks in Europe to assess the risks for virus transmission, virus importation, and short-range dispersion from the outbreak foci. We found that indicators based on voluminous and velocious data can help identify virus dispersion from outbreak foci and that vector abundance and vectorial capacity estimates can provide information on local climate suitability for mosquitoborne outbreaks. In contrast, more established indicators based on Wikipedia and Google Trends search strings were less timely. We found that a combination of novel and disparate datasets can be used in real time to prevent and control emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.
Challenges in Evaluating the Severity of Fibropapillomatosis: A Proposal for Objective Index and Score System for Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas) in Brazil

Fibropapillomatosis (FP) is a neoplastic disease that affects marine turtles worldwide, especially green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas). FP tumors can develop on the body surface of marine turtles and also internally in the oral cavity and viscera. Depending on their quantity, size and anatomical distribution, these tumors can interfere with hydrodynamics and the ability to feed, hence scoring systems have been proposed in an attempt to quantify the clinical manifestation of FP. In order to establish a new scoring system adapted to geographic regions, we examined 214 juvenile green sea turtles with FP caught or rescued at Brazilian feeding areas, counted their 7466 tumors and classified them in relation to their size and anatomical distribution. The patterns in quantity, size and distribution of tumors revealed interesting aspects in the clinical manifestation of FP in specimens studied in Brazil, and that FP scoring systems developed for other areas might not perform adequately when applied to sea turtles on the Southwest Atlantic Ocean. We therefore propose a novel method to evaluate the clinical manifestation of FP: fibropapillomatosis index (FPI) that provides the Southwest Atlantic fibropapillomatosis score (FPSSWA). In combination, these indexing and scoring systems allow for a more objective, rapid and detailed evaluation of the severity of FP in green sea turtles. While primarily designed for the clinical manifestation of FP currently witnessed in our dataset, this index and the score system can be adapted for other areas and compare the characteristics of the disease across regions. In conclusion, scoring systems to classify the severity of FP can assist our understanding on the environmental factors that modulate its development and its impacts on the individual and population health of green sea turtles.
The Electron Energy Distribution in the Hotspots of Cygnus A: Filling the Gap with the Spitzer Space Telescope

Here we present Spitzer Space Telescope imaging of Cyg A with the Infrared Array Camera at 4.5 and 8.0 μm, resulting in the detection of the high-energy tails in the synchrotron spectra for all four hotspots of this radio galaxy. When combined with the other data collected from the literature, our observations allow for detailed modeling of the broadband emission for the brightest hotspots, A and D. We confirm that the X-ray flux detected previously from these features is consistent with the synchrotron self-Compton radiation for the magnetic field intensityB ≈ 170 μG in hotspot A, and B ≈ 270 μG in hotspot D. We also find that the energy density of the emitting electrons is most likely larger by a factor of a few than the energy density of the hotspots' magnetic field. We construct energy spectra of the radiating ultrarelativistic electrons. We find that for both hotspots A and D these spectra are consistent with a broken power law extending from at least 100 MeV up to ~100 GeV, and that the spectral break corresponds almost exactly to the proton rest energy of ~1 GeV. We argue that the shape of the electron continuum most likely reflects two different regimes of the electron acceleration process taking place at mildly relativistic shocks, rather than resulting from radiative cooling and/or absorption effects. In this picture the protons' inertia defines the critical energy for the hotspot electrons, above which Fermi-type acceleration processes may play a major role, but below which the operating acceleration mechanism has to be of a different type.
Flexible Pattern Monitoring for WS-BPEL through Stateful Aspect Extension

The execution of composite web services with WS-BPEL relies on externally autonomous Web services. This implies the need to constantly monitor the running behavior of the involved parties. Moreover, monitoring the execution of such processes is critical to enforce business policies and meet reliability goals. This paper proposes a stateful aspect extension to WS-BPEL, as a solution to support flexible behavior pattern monitoring for composite Web services. Specifically, in the stateful aspect, history-based pointcut specifies the pattern of interest within a range, while advice describes the associated action to manage the process if the specified pattern occurs. We also present its implementation based on finite state automata through runtime weaving mechanism. Our experiments indicate the proposed monitoring approach incurs minimal overhead.
Impact of Mobility on the Performance of Relaying in Ad Hoc Networks

We consider a mobile ad hoc network consisting of three types of nodes: source, destination, and relay nodes. All the nodes are moving over a bounded region with possibly different mobility patterns. We introduce and study the notion of relay throughput, i.e. the maximum rate at which a node can relay data from the source to the destination. Our findings include the results that the relay throughput depends on the node mobility pattern only via its (stationary) node position distribution and that a node mobility pattern that results in a uniform steady-state distribution for all nodes achieves the lowest relay throughput. Random Waypoint and Random Direction mobility models in both one and in two dimensions are studied and approximate simple expressions for the relay throughput are provided. Finally, the behavior of the relay buffer occupancy is examined for the one-dimensional Random Walk, and an explicit form of its mean value is provided in the heavy-traffic case.
Reliability enhancement of bi-stable PUFs in 65nm bulk CMOS

We demonstrate the efficacy and associated costs of three reliability enhancing techniques for bi-stable PUF designs (SRAM and sense amplifier-based) - directed accelerated aging, multiple evaluations, and activation control. Measured results from a 65nm bulk CMOS full custom PUF testchip demonstrate that these technique are able to reduce the percentage of unreliable bits by up to 40%, 83%, and 71% respectively.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CLAUSE IN JAMAICAN CREOLE

‘The most striking differences between the folk speech of Jamaica and the educated speech are not in the sounds, still less in the vocabulary – they are in the grammar, the functional patterns into which the words fall. It is also in this respect that the most fundamental influence from African backgrounds is to be seen, and that is why Jamaican folk speech is not a dialect in the same sense that the rural speech of Devonshire or Lancashire, say, are dialects of English. Those who would hold that Jamaican folk speech is not to be considered a type of English at all, but a new and different language, will find their strongest arguments here (. )’
Family Routines of Adolescents with an AutismSpectrum Disorder: A Literature Review

Family routines can be defined as structured patterns of performing activities that are repeated regularly in everyday life [1]. These are often completed out of habit with little afterthought; therefore do not hold special meaning for the person [1]. In contrast, family rituals describe activities that hold special meaning and value to all family members and are often repeated through generations [1]. Environment and culture have a huge impact on the development of family routines and rituals and so is an important factor to consider [2]. Family routines lay the foundation in which meaningful rituals can develop; therefore both are equally important to facilitate the smooth functioning of family life [1]. Maintaining family routines and rituals has been shown that to have many positive benefits for whole family health and wellbeing. Bossard & Boll [3] suggested that they increase stability within the family, which is important in helping families cope in times of stress. It is recognised that one of the first indicators of stress experienced by the family is when routines and rituals are disrupted [4].
Genomic basis for coral resilience to climate change

Recent advances in DNA-sequencing technologies now allow for in-depth characterization of the genomic stress responses of many organisms beyond model taxa. They are especially appropriate for organisms such as reef-building corals, for which dramatic declines in abundance are expected to worsen as anthropogenic climate change intensifies. Different corals differ substantially in physiological resilience to environmental stress, but the molecular mechanisms behind enhanced coral resilience remain unclear. Here, we compare transcriptome-wide gene expression (via RNA-Seq using Illumina sequencing) among conspecific thermally sensitive and thermally resilient corals to identify the molecular pathways contributing to coral resilience. Under simulated bleaching stress, sensitive and resilient corals change expression of hundreds of genes, but the resilient corals had higher expression under control conditions across 60 of these genes. These “frontloaded” transcripts were less up-regulated in resilient corals during heat stress and included thermal tolerance genes such as heat shock proteins and antioxidant enzymes, as well as a broad array of genes involved in apoptosis regulation, tumor suppression, innate immune response, and cell adhesion. We propose that constitutive frontloading enables an individual to maintain physiological resilience during frequently encountered environmental stress, an idea that has strong parallels in model systems such as yeast. Our study provides broad insight into the fundamental cellular processes responsible for enhanced stress tolerances that may enable some organisms to better persist into the future in an era of global climate change.
Investigating Stories in a Formal Dialogue Game

In this paper we propose a formal dialogue game in which two players aim to determine the best explanation for a set of observations. By assuming an adversarial setting, we force the players to advance and improve their own explanations as well as criticize their opponent's explanations, thus hopefully preventing the well-known problem of 'tunnel vision'. A main novelty of our approach is that the game supports the combination of argumentation with abductive inference to the best explanation.
Temporal patterns of damage and decay kinetics of DNA retrieved from plant herbarium specimens

Herbaria archive a record of changes of worldwide plant biodiversity harboring millions of specimens that contain DNA suitable for genome sequencing. To profit from this resource, it is fundamental to understand in detail the process of DNA degradation in herbarium specimens. We investigated patterns of DNA fragmentation -length and base composition at breaking points-, and nucleotide misincorporation by analyzing 86 herbarium samples spanning the last 300 years using Illumina shot-gun sequencing. We found an exponential decay relationship between DNA fragmentation and time, and estimated a per nucleotide fragmentation rate of 1.66 × 10−4 per year, which is ten times faster than the rate estimated for fossilized bones. Additionally, we found that strand breaks occur specially before purines, and that depurination-driven DNA breakage occurs constantly through time and can to a great extent explain decreasing fragment length over time. Similar of what has been found analyzing ancient DNA from bones, we found a strong correlation between the deamination-driven accumulation of cytosine (C) to thymine (T) substitutions and time, which reinforces the importance of substitution patterns to authenticate the ancient/historical nature of DNA fragments. Accurate estimations of DNA degradation through time will allow informed decisions about laboratory and computational procedures to take advantage of the vast collection of worldwide herbarium specimens.
Biosynthesis of Silver Nanoparticles by Bamboo Leaves Extract and Their Antimicrobial Activity

The synthesis of nanoparticles from biological processes is evolving a new era of research interests in nanotechnology. Silver nanoparticles are usually synthesized by chemicals which are quite toxic and ∞ammable in nature. This study deals with an environment friendly and biosynthesis process of antibacterial silver nanoparticles using bamboo leaves. The formation and characterisation of AgNPs were conflrmed by UV-Vis spectroscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDX), X-ray difiraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The antimicrobial activities were carried out against E. coli and S. aureus strains by using disc difiusion method.
Observation of Top Quark Production in p-barp Collisions with the Collider Detector at Fermilab.

We establish the existence of the top quark using a 67pb{sup {minus}1} data sample of {ital p}{ovr bar}{ital p} collisions at {radical}{ital s}=1.8TeV collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). Employing techniques similar to those we previously published, we observe a signal consistent with {ital tb}{ovr bar}, but inconsistent with the background prediction by 4.8{sigma}. Additional evidence for the top quark is provided by a peak in the reconstructed mass distribution. We measure the top quark mass to be 176{plus_minus}8(stat){plus_minus}10(syst)GeV/{ital c}{sup 2}, and the {ital tt}{ovr bar} production cross section to be 6.8{sub {minus}2.4}{sup +3.6}pb.
High-Temperature Ethanol Fermentation and Transformation with Linear DNA in the Thermotolerant Yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus DMKU3-1042

ABSTRACT We demonstrate herein the ability of Kluyveromyces marxianus to be an efficient ethanol producer and host for expressing heterologous proteins as an alternative to Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Growth and ethanol production by strains of K. marxianus and S. cerevisiae were compared under the same conditions. K. marxianus DMKU3-1042 was found to be the most suitable strain for high-temperature growth and ethanol production at 45°C. This strain, but not S. cerevisiae, utilized cellobiose, xylose, xylitol, arabinose, glycerol, and lactose. To develop a K. marxianus DMKU3-1042 derivative strain suitable for genetic engineering, a uracil auxotroph was isolated and transformed with a linear DNA of the S. cerevisiae ScURA3 gene. Surprisingly, Ura+ transformants were easily obtained. By Southern blot hybridization, the linear ScURA3 DNA was found to have inserted randomly into the K. marxianus genome. Sequencing of one Lys− transformant confirmed the disruption of the KmLYS1 gene by the ScURA3 insertion. A PCR-amplified linear DNA lacking K. marxianus sequences but containing an Aspergillus α-amylase gene under the control of the ScTDH3 promoter together with an ScURA3 marker was subsequently used to transform K. marxianus DMKU3-1042 in order to obtain transformants expressing Aspergillus α-amylase. Our results demonstrate that K. marxianus DMKU3-1042 can be an alternative cost-effective bioethanol producer and a host for transformation with linear DNA by use of S. cerevisiae-based molecular genetic tools.
Why Attachment Security Matters: How Customers’ Attachment Styles Influence Their Relationships With Service Firms and Service Employees

Relational orientations vary across customers, so marketing activities should be customized to individual customers or market segments. However, little is known about the underlying processes that influence how customers bond with a service firm and its employees. This article explains customer-firm and customer-employee relationships using attachment theory. It provides theoretical and empirical evidence that customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and low levels of attachment avoidance perceive a service firm and service employee more positively—in terms of satisfaction, trust, and affective commitment—than customers with high levels. However, since a service firm and service employee are separate attachment targets, this study also tests whether customers have a similar propensity to bond with both. Insecurely attached customers who find interpersonal bonds with employees deficient, compensate for this deficiency by being more likely to bond with the service firm. Companies that measure customer attachment styles can better segment markets, manage customer relationships, and allocate resources more effectively. For example, customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance toward the firm are candidates for social relationship programs, whereas customers with high levels of attachment avoidance are likely to be more responsive to financial reward programs.
A general result on the stabilization of linear systems using bounded controls

We present two constructions of controllers that globally stabilize linear systems subject to control saturation. The only conditions imposed are the obvious necessary ones, namely that no eigenvalues of the uncontrolled system have positive real part and that the standard stabilizability rank condition holds. We use essentially arbitrary saturations /spl sigma/, subject only to the requirement that: (i) /spl sigma/ is locally Lipschitz, (ii) s/spl sigma/(s)>0 whenever s/spl ne/0, (iii) /spl sigma/ is differentiable at 0 and /spl sigma/'(0)>0, and (iv) lim inf/sub |s|/spl rarr//spl infin//|/spl sigma/(s)|>0. <<ETX>>
A snake robot joint mechanism with a contact force measurement system

A snake robot can traverse cluttered and irregular environments by using irregularities around its body as push-points to aid the propulsion. This is denoted obstacle-aided locomotion and requires the snake robot to have two features: 1) a smooth exterior surface combined with 2) a contact force sensing system. These two features are characteristic of biological snakes, but have received limited attention in snake robot designs so far. This paper presents a joint mechanism for a snake robot aimed at meeting both these requirements. The paper details the design and implementation of the joint mechanism and presents experimental results that validate the function of the contact force measurement system.
Instruction Re-encoding Facilitating Dense Embedded Code

Reducing the code size of embedded applications is one of the important constraint in embedded system design. Code compression can provide substantial savings in terms of size. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient hardware-supported approach. Our approach investigates the benefits of re-encoding the unused bits (we call them re-encodable bits) in the instruction format for a specific application to improve the compression ratio. Re-encoding those bits may reduce the size of decoding table by more than 37%. We achieve compression ratios as low as 44% (including all overhead that incurs). We have conducted evaluations using a representative set of applications and have applied it to two major embedded processors, namely MIPS and ARM.
Associative Memory Storage and Retrieval: Involvement of Theta Oscillations in Hippocampal Information Processing

Theta oscillations are thought to play a critical role in neuronal information processing, especially in the hippocampal region, where their presence is particularly salient. A detailed description of theta dynamics in this region has revealed not only a consortium of layer-specific theta dipoles, but also within-layer differences in the expression of theta. This complex and articulated arrangement of current flows is reflected in the way neuronal firing is modulated in time. Several models have proposed that these different theta modulators flexibly coordinate hippocampal regions, to support associative memory formation and retrieval. Here, we summarily review different approaches related to this issue and we describe a mechanism, based on experimental and simulation results, for memory retrieval in CA3 involving theta modulation.
A comparative study on the nursery culture of hatchery-reared sub-adult cupped oyster, Crassostrea iredalei (Faustino, 1932), in an earthen pond and a mangrove canal

Abstract A comparative study on the nursery culture of the spat of the tropical oyster, Crassostrea iredalei, in an earthen pond and a mangrove canal was conducted over two months. The results revealed no differences in the absolute growth rate determined by shell width between the two culture sites (P < 0.05). Sub-adult oysters cultured in the mangrove canal showed a higher absolute growth rate in shell length and a higher daily growth rate than the oysters cultured in the earthen pond (P < 0.05). The mean survival rate of sub-adult oysters cultured in the earthen pond (99.8 ± 0.2%) was significantly higher than for those cultured in the mangrove canal (66.7 ± 31.4%). Decreased density from the loss of sub-adult oyster nursery culture in the mangrove canal led to higher growth performance than in the earthen pond. However, no difference was found for the fraction of oysters larger or smaller than 5 cm for the two culture sites (P < 0.05). A significant difference was noted in the Condition Index (CI) between the two culture sites (P < 0.05). The high primary productivity in mangroves is a major supporter of higher CI in sub-adult oysters cultured in mangrove canals versus in earthen ponds. Water exchange in the earthen pond to maintain calcium and magnesium concentrations resulted in no differences in the shell compressibility of sub-adult oysters compared with those cultured in the mangrove canal.
How I Learned to be Secure: a Census-Representative Survey of Security Advice Sources and Behavior

Few users have a single, authoritative, source from whom they can request digital-security advice. Rather, digital-security skills are often learned haphazardly, as users filter through an overwhelming quantity of security advice. By understanding the factors that contribute to users' advice sources, beliefs, and security behaviors, we can help to pare down the quantity and improve the quality of advice provided to users, streamlining the process of learning key behaviors. This paper rigorously investigates how users' security beliefs, knowledge, and demographics correlate with their sources of security advice, and how all these factors influence security behaviors. Using a carefully pre-tested, U.S.-census-representative survey of 526 users, we present an overview of the prevalence of respondents' advice sources, reasons for accepting and rejecting advice from those sources, and the impact of these sources and demographic factors on security behavior. We find evidence of a "digital divide" in security: the advice sources of users with higher skill levels and socioeconomic status differ from those with fewer resources. This digital security divide may add to the vulnerability of already disadvantaged users. Additionally, we confirm and extend results from prior small-sample studies about why users accept certain digital-security advice (e.g., because they trust the source rather than the content) and reject other advice (e.g., because it is inconvenient and because it contains too much marketing material). We conclude with recommendations for combating the digital divide and improving the efficacy of digital-security advice.