Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Single-well genotyping of diallelic sequence variations by a two-color ELISA-based oligonucleotide ligation assay.

Single nucleotide substitutions and unique insertions/deletions are the most common form of DNA sequence variation and disease-causing mutation in the human genome. Because of the biological and medical importance of these variations, a wide array of methods have been developed for their typing. We have applied an approach that combines the amplification of polymorphic regions by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with a system for typing diallelic variants using an oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA). In this report, we describe a significant advance in this technology that permits the typing of two alleles in a single microtiter well. By marking each of the allele-specific primers with a unique hapten, i.e. digoxigenin and fluorescein, each OLA reaction can be detected by using hapten specific antibodies that are labeled with different enzyme reporters, alkaline phosphatase or horseradish peroxidase. This system permits the detection of the two alleles using a high throughput format that leads to the production of two different colors. We demonstrate the specificity, sensitivity and ease of data interpretation with this system. Furthermore, we show that multiplex PCR/OLA not only increases the throughput of DNA typing but also increases its accuracy in typing diallelic sequence variations using an approach that can be broadly applied for human genome analysis (in evaluating genotype/phenotype links), in typing infectious agents and in forensic analysis.
A Measurement-based Study on Application Popularity in Android and iOS App Stores

Mobile application stores (appstores) are emerging digital distribution platforms with explosive growth. Although there have been some observations on the mobile application (app) popularity in Android appstores, there is no report on the app popularity in iOS appstores. What's more, the details about user downloads and app popularity, such as the composition of downloads traffic and the migration of user interests, are untouched yet. In this paper, we unreel these issues based on five-month measurements of four third-party appstores (two for Android and two for iOS respectively). Our main results include: 1) The app popularity distributions of third-party Android appstores are different from those of iOS third-party appstores. There is an exponential cut-off observed besides the Zipf-like distribution in the app popularity distribution of Android appstores. 2) In both Android and iOS families of appstores, the major part of downloads traffic is contributed by the large-size apps, counting 80% or more in the volume of total downloads traffic. 3) There is less rank variance of the most popular apps in the iOS appstores than those in the Android appstores. About 52% of the top 100 iOS apps observed in one month are still in the rank of top 100 in the following four months.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE – READY-TO-USE PLATED MEDIA

PRINCIPLES AND EXPLANATION OF THE PROCEDURE Microbiological method. Schaedler Agar with 5% Sheep Blood is a highly nutritious medium, specifically developed for the growth of obligate anaerobes such as lactobacilli, streptococci, clostridia and Bacteroides. 1-3 With the addition of vitamin K1 and hemin, it is the base for several selective media including Schaedler KV Agar with 5% Sheep Blood. In Schaedler Agar with 5% Sheep Blood three peptones provide nutrients. Glucose is an energy source. Tris buffer is included to avoid an extreme decrease of the pH during glucose fermentation. Yeast extract is a rich source of the vitamins. The hemin and sheep blood supply heme needed by a variety of strict anaerobes and additional growth promoting substances. The inclusion of vitamin K is an additional modification and was added since it is a growth requirement for some strains of Prevotella melaninogenica (Bacteroides melaninogenicus) and is reported to enhance the growth of some strains of Bacteroides and gram-positive nonsporeformers. 4,5 Sodium chloride provides essential electrolytes. Today, the medium is widely used as a non-selective, highly nutritious medium for the isolation strict anaerobes. Schaedler KV Agar with 5% Sheep Blood contains the same base medium as Schaedler Agar with 5% Sheep Blood. In addition, the medium is supplemented with kanamycin and vancomycin. Kanamycin inhibits Gram negative facultatively anaerobic rods and several other facultative bacteria, while vancomycin inhibits Gram positive bacteria. The addition of these antimicrobials renders the medium selective for Gram negative strict anaerobes, such as Bacteroides and Prevotella. 5-8 BD Schaedler Agar / Schaedler KV Agar, with 5% Sheep Blood (Biplate) is used for primary isolation of strict anaerobes and of Gram negative strictly anaerobic rods from clinical specimens.
A New Risk Indicator and Stress Testing Tool: A Multifactor Nth-to-Default CDS Basket

This paper generalizes a market-based indicator for financial sector surveillance using a multifactor latent structure in the determination of the default probabilities of an nth-to-default credit default swap (CDS) basket of large complex financial institutions (LCFIs). To estimate the multifactor latent structure, we link the market risk (the covariance of the LCFIs' equity) to credit risk (the default probability of the CDS basket) in a coherent manner. In addition, to analyze the response of the probabilities of default to changing macroeconomic conditions, we run a stress test by generating shocks to the latent multifactor structure. The results unveil a rich set of default probability dynamics and help in identifying the most relevant sources of risk. We anticipate that this approach could be of value to financial supervisors and risk managers alike.
Cardiovascular Risk Factors for Incident Hypertension in the Prehypertensive Population

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of changes in cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors on progression from prehypertension (PreHTN) to hypertension (HTN) using an 8-yr prospective Korean Cancer Prevention Study (KCPS) by the National Health Insurance Corporation (NHIC) in Korea. METHODS A total of 16,229 subjects, aged 30 to 54, with new onset preHTN at baseline (1994-1996) in a biennial national medical exam were selected and followed up till 2004 at 2-yr intervals. All subjects underwent a biennial health examination including biochemical measurements and behavior. The log-rank test was performed to assess the relationship between changes in CVD risk factors and progression to HTN. The Cox proportional hazard model was used to identify factors influencing progression to HTN. RESULTS With regards the progression rate in men, ex-smokers (42.9%), abstainers (37.5%), and regular exercisers (37.6%) showed a slower progression rate than continuous smokers (49.5%) and continuous drinkers (50.9%). In women, those who participated in regular exercise (22.6%) had a lower rate of progression than continuous non-exercisers (36.1%). According to the results of the Cox proportional hazard model, improvements in smoking (hazard ratio [HR], 0.756), drinking (HR, 0.669), regular exercise (HR, 0.653), body mass index (HR, 0.715), and total cholesterol (HR, 0.788) played a protective role in progression to HTN in men, while in women, participating in regular exercise (HR, 0.534) was beneficial. CONCLUSION Improvements in CVD-related behaviors diminished the progression rate of HTN. This study suggests that individuals with PreHTN should be targeted for specific health behavioral intervention to prevent the progression of HTN.
Rationality and Students’ Misconduct at University: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications

We investigate the determinants of students’ misconduct at university. Using a sample of 310 surveyed students, we find that students are more likely to cheat when they have previous misconduct records, when they perceive academic integrity policy as being poorly enforced, and when they perceive that instructor tolerance toward misconduct incidents is high. Moreover, misconduct behavior tends to increase with students’ seniority and the perceived level of course difficulty. Surprisingly, students’ motivations toward reading, writing, and learning do not seem to have a valuable impact on the likelihood of their misconduct. Our findings have important policy implications that relate to the university culture of academic integrity, instructors’ tolerance vis-à-vis students’ misconduct behavior, and the effectiveness of punitive actions.
Identifying subassemblies by ultrasound to prevent fuel handling error in sodium fast reactors: First test performed in water

Identifying subassemblies by ultrasound is a method that is being considered to prevent handling errors in sodium fast reactors. It is based on the reading of a code (aligned notches) engraved on the subassembly head by an emitting/receiving ultrasonic sensor. This reading is carried out in sodium with high temperature transducers. The resulting one-dimensional C-scan can be likened to a binary code expressing the subassembly type and number. The first test performed in water investigated two parameters: width and depth of the notches. The code remained legible for notches as thin as 1.6 mm wide. The impact of the depth seems minor in the range under investigation.
Experiments in automatic ock control

The Robot Sheepdog Project has developed a mobile robot that gathers a ock of ducks and manoeuvres them safely to a speci ed goal position. This is the rst example of a robot system that exploits and controls an animal's behaviour to achieve a useful task. A potentialeld model of ocking behaviour was constructed and used to investigate methods for generalised ock control. One possible algorithm is described and demonstrated to work both in simulation and in the real world.
Suggestive correlations between the brightness of Neptune, solar variability, and Earth's temperature

Long‐term photometric measurements of Neptune show variations of brightness over half a century. Seasonal change in Neptune's atmosphere may partially explain a general rise in the long‐term light curve, but cannot explain its detailed variations. This leads us to consider the possibility of solar‐driven changes, i.e., changes incurred by innate solar variability perhaps coupled with changing seasonal insolation. Although correlations between Neptune's brightness and Earth's temperature anomaly—and between Neptune and two models of solar variability—are visually compelling, at this time they are not statistically significant due to the limited degrees of freedom of the various time series. Nevertheless, the striking similarity of the temporal patterns of variation should not be ignored simply because of low formal statistical significance. If changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment.
Thermal conductance imaging of graphene contacts

Suspended graphene has the highest measured thermal conductivity of any material at room temperature. However, when graphene is supported by a substrate or encased between two materials, basal-plane heat transfer is suppressed by phonon interactions at the interfaces. We have used frequency domain thermoreflectance to create thermal conductance maps of graphene contacts, obtaining simultaneous measurements of the basal-plane thermal conductivity and cross-plane thermal boundary conductance for 1–7 graphitic layers encased between titanium and silicon dioxide. We find that the basal-plane thermal conductivity is similar to that of graphene supported on silicon dioxide. Our results have implications for heat transfer in two-dimensional material systems, and are relevant for applications such as graphene transistors and other nanoelectronic devices.
Doppel-Code: A Clone Visualization Tool for Prioritizing Global and Local Clone Impacts

In our research, we have focused on mining software repositories to support software engineering development and code clone search. We developed Doppel-Code, a clone visualization tool to aid searching for code clones across 18 000 open source projects. For clone visualization, we take into account clone impact - both globally and locally - to further aid developers' software maintenance activities.
Antibiotic resistance and molecular epidemiology of Escherichia coli O26, O103 and O145 shed by two cohorts of Scottish beef cattle.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to identify the profile of antibiotic resistance among E. coli O26, O103 and O145 in two cohorts of Scottish beef cattle on two farms and to determine whether there is an association between resistant phenotypes and the genotypic PFGE patterns to suggest clonality among resistant strains. METHODS MICs of 11 antibiotics for 297 E. coli O26, 152 E. coli O103 and 13 E. coli O145 were determined. Isolates were screened for the presence integrons 1 and 2 and the virulence factors stx1, stx2, eaeA and ehxA by PCR with specific primers. PFGE subtyping was performed after digestion with XbaI endonuclease. RESULTS Among E. coli O26, O103 and O145 there were four, four and one isolates, respectively, that harboured a class 1 integron. A class 2 integron was detected in only one O145 isolate. Diversity in PFGE patterns was higher among E. coli O103 and O145 strains compared with the O26 serotype; and PFGE demonstrated 13, 27 and 6 different patterns among O26, O103 and O145 isolates, respectively. Selective PFGE types that harboured virulence factors were widespread among the cattle population throughout the sampling period. There were multiply resistant isolates that were of similar PFGE patterns. CONCLUSIONS The dissemination and persistence of certain PFGE genotypes among the cattle population was evident in this study. Certain resistance phenotypes, especially among E. coli O26 isolates, were associated with distinct PFGE clones.
Predicting segmental duration using Bayesian belief networks

Modelling segment duration in text-to-speech systems is hindered by the database imbalance and factor interaction problems. We propose a probabilistic Bayesian belief network (BN) approach to overcome data sparsity and factor interaction problems. The belief network approach makes good estimations in cases of missed or incomplete data. Also, it captures factor interaction in a concise way of causal relationships among the nodes in a directed acyclic (DAG) graph. Furthermore, a belief network approach allows a signiﬁcant reduction of the number of parameters to be estimated. In our work, we model segment duration as a hybrid Bayesian network consisting of discrete and continuous nodes; each node in the network represents a linguistic factor that affects segmental duration. The interaction between the factors is represented as conditional dependence relations in the graphical model. We contrasted the results of belief network model with those of sums of products model and classiﬁcation and regression tree (CART) model. We trained and tested all three models on the same data. Our BN model of vowels performs better than the SoP model: the belief network achieves a RMS error of 3 milliseconds compared with 7 ms from SoP. The CART model also produces an error of 3 ms, and hence our new model isn’t any worse in terms of ﬁnal performance. The BN model for consonants also produces promissing RMS error values; the BN gives a value of 2 milliseconds versus 4 ms for SoP and 1 ms for the CART. The consonant BN architecture is not optimal in terms of correlation values; a search for better model will be done in the future. However, we think our model has many other advantages compared to SoP, for instance it is much easier to conﬁgure and experiment with new features. This should make it easier to adapt to new languages.
Forecasts and Reactivity

Forecasters’ estimates influence peoples’ expectations, their decisions and thus also actual market outcomes. Such reactivity to forecasts induces externalities which harm the ex-post assessment of the forecasters’ accuracy and in turn the improvement of forecasting accuracy and market outcomes. To empirically analyze the impact of reactivity on forecast accuracy, we compare the development of the forecast error in a non-reactive system, such as the market for weather forecasts, to reactive systems, such as the stock and the art market. The evidence strongly supports our proposition that in reactive systems, despite the vast increase of data and processing techniques, forecast accuracy did not improve, while forecast accuracy in non-reactive systems did.
Studying software evolution information by visualizing the change history

Before re-engineering a large and complex software system, it is wise to study its change history in order to identify the most valuable and problematic parts. Unfortunately, typical change histories contain thousands of entries, therefore the challenge is to discover those changes which are relevant for both the current and future situations of our product and process. We demonstrate how a simple visualization allows us to recognize relevant changes. Applying the technique on the change history of Tomcat, we have been able to identify (a) unstable components, (b) coherent entities, (c) design and architectural evolution, and (d) fluctuations in team productivity.
Nuclease Delivery: Versatile Functions of SLX4/FANCP in Genome Maintenance

As a scaffold, SLX4/FANCP interacts with multiple proteins involved in genome integrity. Although not having recognizable catalytic domains, SLX4 participates in diverse genome maintenance pathways by delivering nucleases where they are needed, and promoting their cooperative execution to prevent genomic instabilities. Physiological importance of SLX4 is emphasized by the identification of causative mutations of SLX4 genes in patients diagnosed with Fanconi anemia (FA), a rare recessive genetic disorder characterized by genomic instability and predisposition to cancers. Recent progress in understanding functional roles of SLX4 has greatly expanded our knowledge in the repair of DNA interstrand crosslinks (ICLs), Holliday junction (HJ) resolution, telomere homeostasis and regulation of DNA damage response induced by replication stress. Here, these diverse functions of SLX4 are reviewed in detail.
The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers

Previous work has shown that heritage grammars are often simplified compared to their monolingual counterparts, especially in domains in which the societally-dominant language makes fewer distinctions than the heritage language. We investigated whether linguistic simplification extended to the anaphoric system of Turkish heritage speakers living in Germany. Whereas the Turkish monolingual grammar features a three-way distinction between reflexives (kendi), pronouns (o), and syntactically-unconstrained anaphors (kendisi), German only distinguishes between two categories, pronouns and reflexives. We examined whether heritage speakers simplified the Turkish anaphor system by assimilating the syntactically unconstrained anaphor kendisi to either of the two categories attested in the societally-dominant language, German. Speakers’ sensitivity to grammatical distinctions in comprehension was assessed using an offline antecedent selection task and an online self-paced reading task. Our results showed that heritage speakers retain the three-way anaphoric distinctions of the monolingual grammar but there were also differences between the results of the offline and the online tasks. We suggest that processing paradigms are a useful complement to judgment tasks when studying how heritage speakers use grammatical distinctions involving optionality, as online measures can reveal distinctions that are allowed, even if dispreferred by comprehenders.
The role of paliperidone extended release for the treatment of bipolar disorder

Background Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic, relapsing, episodic mental illness associated with other psychiatric comorbidities. There is a substantial economic burden with BD, which makes it challenging to treat. The aim of this review is to evaluate the pharmacology, clinical efficacy, and safety data related to paliperidone extended release (ER) for the treatment of BD. Methods A literature search was performed from January 1966 through January 2012 using PreMEDLINE, MEDLINE, EMBASE, IPA, and ClinicalTrials.gov to identify articles in English regarding the pharmacology, clinical efficacy, and safety of paliperidone ER in acute mania or mixed episodes or in the maintenance treatment of BD I. Results There are currently three published studies relating to the use of paliperidone ER for the treatment of BD. Two of these evaluated paliperidone ER as monotherapy for acute mania, while the other assessed its role as adjunct with a mood stabilizer. Conclusion According to the limited available evidence, paliperidone at higher doses of ER 9–12 mg/day may be a safe and efficacious treatment option for acute episodes of mania in BD. A once-daily dose formulation may improve patient adherence to treatment; however, the cost of paliperidone ER, which is higher than that of generically available second-generation antipsychotics (such as olanzapine and risperidone), and a lack of alternative dosage forms (ie, liquid, intramuscular) compared with other agents may limit its usefulness in the treatment of BD. The role of paliperidone ER as an adjunctive agent or for long-term use requires further investigation.
CMOS and Memristor Technologies for Neuromorphic Computing Applications by

In this work, I present a CMOS implementation of a neuromorphic system that aims to mimic the behavior of biological neurons and synapses in the human brain. The synapse is modeled with a memristor-resistor voltage divider, while the neuron-emulating circuit (“CMOS Neuron”) comprises transistors and capacitors. The input aggregation and output firing characteristics of a CMOS Neuron are based on observations from studies in neuroscience, and achieved using both analog and digital circuit design principles. The important Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) learning scheme is explored in detail, and a simple adaptive learning experiment is performed to demonstrate the CMOS Neuron’s potential for future artificial intelligence applications.