Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of Escherichia coli DnaAcos protein in replication systems reconstituted with highly purified proteins

Excessive initiation of chromosomal replication occurs in the dnaAcos mutant at 30°C. Whereas purified wild‐type DnaA protein binds ATP and ADP tightly, DnaAcos protein is defective for such nucleotide binding. As initiation is a multistep reaction and DnaA protein functions at each step, activities of DnaAcos protein need to be examined precisely. DnaAcos protein specifically bound a DNA fragment containing the chromosomal replication origin with an affinity similar to that seen with the wild‐type protein. In a system reconstituted with purified proteins at 30°C, the mutant protein initiated replication of single‐stranded DNA that contains a DnaA‐binding hairpin structure. Thus, DnaAcos protein basically sustains affinity to a DnaA‐binding sequence and functions in the loading of DnaB helicase onto single‐stranded DNA. Thermal stabilities of wild‐type DnaA and DnaAcos activities were comparable. Unlike wild‐type DnaA protein, DnaAcos protein was inactive for minichromosomal replication in systems reconstituted with purified proteins in which the ATP‐bound form of DnaA protein is required for initiation. Taken together, the data indicate that the prominent defect in DnaAcos protein appears to be the inability to bind nucleotide.
Organizational justice: evidence of a new psychosocial predictor of health.

OBJECTIVES This study examined the justice of decision-making procedures and interpersonal relations as a psychosocial predictor of health. METHODS Regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between levels of perceived justice and self-rated health, minor psychiatric disorders, and recorded absences due to sickness in a cohort of 506 male and 3570 female hospital employees aged 19 to 63 years. RESULTS The odds ratios of poor self-rated health and minor psychiatric disorders associated with low vs high levels of perceived justice ranged from 1.7 to 2.4. The rates of absence due to sickness among those perceiving low justice were 1.2 to 1.9 times higher than among those perceiving high justice. These associations remained significant after adjustment for behavioral risks, workload, job control, and social support. CONCLUSIONS Low organizational justice is a risk to the health of employees.
The Smallest Mass Ratio Young Star Spectroscopic Binaries

Using high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy with the Keck Telescope, we have detected the radial velocity signatures of the cool secondary components in four optically identified pre-main-sequence, single-lined spectroscopic binaries. All are weak-lined T Tauri stars with well-defined center-of-mass velocities. The mass ratio for one young binary, NTTS 160905-1859, is M2/M1 = 0.18 ± 0.01, the smallest yet measured dynamically for a pre-main-sequence spectroscopic binary. These new results demonstrate the power of infrared spectroscopy for the dynamical identification of cool secondaries. Visible-light spectroscopy, to date, has not revealed any pre-main-sequence secondary stars with masses <0.5 M☉, while two of the young systems reported here are in that range. We compare our targets with a compilation of the published young, double-lined spectroscopic binaries and discuss our unique contribution to this sample.
Combined rate and power adaptation in DS/CDMA communications over Nakagami fading channels

We consider combined rate and power adaptations in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access communications, where the transmission power and the data rate are adapted relative to channel variations. We discuss the power gain that the combined adaptations provide over power adaptation. Then, we consider an integrated voice and data transmission system that offers a constant bit rate voice service, using power adaptation and a variable bit rate data service with rate adaptation. We present an expression for the required average transmission power of each traffic type having different quality-of-service specifications and discuss the capacity gain over power adaptation for voice and data.
STUDENT VOICES—WHAT MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT PHYSICAL EDUCATION

This study was the result of an action research project between a local urban school system and the Physical Education faculty at a nearby college. The faculty and the teachers worked together to design, administer, and analyze a student survey that would give voice to middle and high school student perspectives on physical education. Over 5000 surveys were returned. When asked to rate the most important reasons why students choose to participate in physical education, most students agreed that they liked to get out and move, they liked competitive team sports, it made them healthier, and they had fun. When asked why students would choose not to participate, most students agreed with that they didn’t like doing the same activities every year and that showering and changing were barriers to participation. Some differences in responses were found between middle school students and high school students.
Executive Function Deficits in HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Decline

People with HIV infection are living longer as a result of advances in combination antiretroviral therapy. This increase in lifespan has been coupled with an increase in the prevalence of HIV associated neurocognitive decline (HAND). A central feature of this presentation is the impairment of executive functioning, and the aim of this study was to explore whether there is general impairment of this domain or whether there is an executive function profile (of deficits versus relatively preserved aspects of function) in people with HAND. Sixteen participants with HAND (mean age = 49.25 years, range 23 to 72 years) were recruited from an inpatient HIV-rehabilitation unit, and completed cognitive and executive function batteries. The executive function profile obtained at group level suggested impairments in working memory, verbal initiation, verbal inhibition, rule induction, and processing speed abilities. In contrast letter fluency and visuo-spatial switching scores were less affected. Case series analyses indicated that cognitive and executive functioning varied widely within the participant sample. However verbal initiation and inhibition were impaired in all profiles, indicating these impairments are prominent in the early stages of disease. The findings of this study indicate that it may be beneficial for clinicians to use executive function batteries when assessing for HAND, since a thorough assessment of this multi-faceted cognitive domain can support more informed clinical decision-making. Further, the study suggests which tests may be clinically useful in detecting executive function deficits in HAND.
Endoscopic third ventriculostomy: predicting outcome with phase-contrast MR imaging.

PURPOSE To determine whether phase-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) imaging measurements of preoperative cerebral blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) hydrodynamics can be used as a biomarker of response to endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV). MATERIALS AND METHODS Approval from the local research ethics committee and written informed consent were obtained for this prospective study. Thirteen patients (six female patients, seven male patients; median age, 43 years) with chronic obstructive hydrocephalus, 12 of whom went on to undergo ETV, were imaged with phase-contrast MR imaging at 1.5 T to determine rates of total cerebral blood flow (CBF) and ventriculostomy defect, foramen magnum (FM), and cerebral aqueduct CSF flow. Ten control subjects (10 men; median age, 37 years) were similarly imaged. Correlations between measured values were assessed by means of Pearson correlation coefficients. Measurements were compared between groups with a Mann-Whitney test, and measurements before and after surgical intervention were compared with a Wilcoxon test for paired samples. RESULTS Rates of CBF (356 mL . min(-1) +/- 73 [standard deviation] vs 518 mL . min(-1) +/- 79, P < . 001) and CSF flow in the FM (17.62 mL . min(-1) +/- 13.12 vs 36.35 mL . min(-1) +/- 8, P < . 05) were significantly lower in patients than in control subjects. CONCLUSION ETV induces changes in brain volume and CBF that can be predicted by using simple metrics. These pilot results support a formal trial of these techniques in a larger prospective study.
Serum Levels of Surface Large Envelope Proteins: Prognostic Markers for Hepatitis B e Antigen-Negative Patients with Adefovir Dipivoxil Treatment

Background The present investigation was undertaken to evaluate the prognostic role of pretreatment serum hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface large envelope protein (LHBs) levels in the curative effects after 48-week adefovir dipivoxil (ADV) treatment. Methods A total of 128 patients received ADV once daily for 48 weeks. Serum levels of LHBs were detected by ELISA. Real-time quantitative PCR was used to analyse HBV genotype and HBV DNA copies in serum. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to assess the optimal cutoff value of pretreatment LHBs for predicting the curative effects of ADV treatment. Results After ADV treatment for 48 weeks, viral response and partial response were 31.4% (16/51) and 29.4% (15/51), respectively, in patients from the hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)-positive group; viral response and partial response were 39.7% (27/68) and 39.7% (27/68), respectively, in patients from the HBeAg-negative group. HBeAg-negative patients with high serum levels of LHBs had low response rates to antiviral therapy. ROC curve analysis showed that HBeAg-negative patients with serum LHBs levels ≥3.889 μg/ml at baseline predicted non-response to antiviral therapy. The sensitivity was 42.5% and specificity was 92.86%. Among a total of 19 patients with high serum levels of LHBs (≥3.889 μg/ml) at baseline, only 2 (11%) patients responded to antiviral therapy. There was no correlation observed between HBV genotype and effects of ADV treatment. Conclusions HBeAg-negative patients with high serum levels of LHBs (≥3.889 μg/ml) at baseline should not be recommended to receive ADV treatment.
TCP performance over end-to-end rate control and stochastic available capacity

Motivated by TCP over end-to-end ABR, we study the performance of adaptive window congestion control, when it operates over an explicit feedback rate-control mechanism, in a situation in which the bandwidth available to the elastic traffic is stochastically time varying. It is assumed that the sender and receiver of the adaptive window protocol are colocated with the rate-control endpoints. The objective of the study is to understand if the interaction of the rate-control loop and the window-control loop is beneficial for end-to-end throughput, and how the parameters of the problem (propagation delay, bottleneck buffers, and rate of variation of the available bottleneck bandwidth) affect the performance.The available bottleneck bandwidth is modeled as a two-state Markov chain. We develop an analysis that explicitly models the bottleneck buffers, the delayed explicit rate feedback, and TCP's adaptive window mechanism. The analysis, however, applies only when the variations in the available bandwidth occur over periods larger than the round-trip delay. For fast variations of the bottleneck bandwidth, we provide results from a simulation on a TCP testbed that uses Linux TCP code, and a simulation/emulation of the network model inside the Linux kernel.We find that, over end-to-end ABR, the performance of TCP improves significantly if the network bottleneck bandwidth variations are slow as compared to the round-trip propagation delay. Further, we find that TCP over ABR is relatively insensitive to bottleneck buffer size. These results are for a short-term average link capacity feedback at the ABR level (INSTCAP). We use the testbed to study EFFCAP feedback, which is motivated by the notion of the effective capacity of the bottleneck link. We find that EFFCAP feedback is adaptive to the rate of bandwidth variations at the bottleneck link, and thus yields good performance (as compared to INSTCAP) over a wide range of the rate of bottleneck bandwidth variation. Finally, we study if TCP over ABR, with EFFCAP feedback, provides throughput fairness even if the connections have different round-trip propagation delays.
Empirical Properties of a Scale to Assess Writing Self-Efficacy in School Contexts

Abstract The psychometric properties of a scale assessing the writing self-efficacy of 1.258 students from Grades 4 to II were analyzed with exploratory factor analysis. Two factors emerged. I designating basic grammar skills and I designating more advanced composition skills. The Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (F. Pajares & G. Valiante, 1999) functioned equally well at each academic level assessed.
A composite K ‐band luminosity function for cluster galaxies

We present a composite K -band luminosity function for 10 clusters at low redshift, where member galaxies are identified from an existing spectroscopic survey (the 2dF galaxy redshift survey). Our kinematically selected K -band luminosity function is well fitted by a Schechter function with MK * = –24.50 + 5 log h and α = –0.98 over –27 ≪ MK –5 log h < –22. This is very similar to the 2dF field value and suggests that the integrated mass accretion history of galaxies does not vary strongly with environment (© 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Health problems among six-week old Pacific infants living in New Zealand.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this paper is to describe maternal reports of various health problems experienced by their Pacific infants in the first six weeks of their lives and to examine the infant, maternal and socio-demographic factors associated with infant health problems. MATERIAL/METHODS The data were gathered as part of the Pacific Islands Families: First Two Years of Life (PIF) Study in which mothers in the cohort (n=1376) were interviewed about the health problems experienced by their infants (n=1398) in the first six weeks of life. RESULTS Fifty-five percent of mothers reported that their infant had experienced minor health problems, and 15.6% reported moderate to severe infant health problems. Most mothers (98%) reported that they had a regular family doctor or health clinic to go to if their infant had a health problem. We found no meaningful associations between infant, maternal, or socio-demograhic variables and general infant health problems, possibly because of the wide range of infant illnesses reported. Since 43% of the infant health problems reported were related to breathing difficulties we carried out univariate and multivariate analyses on this specific health problem. Factors significantly associated (p<0.05) with infant breathing problems were maternal cigarette smoking during the last trimester, cold housing, and residing in New Zealand for over 10 years. CONCLUSIONS The high rate of infant health problems, in particular infant breathing problems, among Pacific infants in this cohort and the significant links with modifiable factors warrant priority action by housing and health agencies to minimise the consequences of these risk factors.
Cruise Tourism: Economic, Socio-Cultural and Environmental Impacts

Cruise tourism generates an estimated $18 billion a year in passenger expenditure and has been the fastest growing sector of the travel industry in the last years. Arrivals in the Caribbean region increased from three million in 1980 to more than 25 million in 2007. In this paper we describe the evolution of the cruise industry and review the experiences of different cruise destinations. We also describe different activities associated to the cruise ship industry to identify costs and benefits for the actors of the local economies.
Is a woman’s chronological age or ‘ovarian age’ more important in determining perinatal outcome after assisted reproductive treatment?

Abstract Ovarian reserve (OR) decreases as women get older but there is considerable variation in the rate at which this occurs. Older women are at increased risk of complications during pregnancy. The aim of the study was to determine whether poor OR influences perinatal outcomes independent of age. All fresh IVF/ICSI cycles in which a single embryo was transferred between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2016 were reviewed. An anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) concentration of ≤5.4 pmol/l was considered poor and 5.41–24.99 pmol/l normal. Data were collected regarding cycle outcome, congenital anomalies, gestational age at delivery and birth weight. A total of 1520 women were included, of whom 1197 had normal OR and the remaining 323 had poor OR. Once pregnant, after adjusting for maternal age, women with poor OR (n = 109) were no more likely to experience a biochemical pregnancy or miscarriage (41.3% versus 41.6%, p = 0.809) than women with normal OR (n = 596). There were no significant differences in rates of congenital anomalies (1.8% versus 1.2%, p = 0.636), birth weight (3272 ± 630.7 g versus 3376.4 ± 576.3 g, p = 0.216) or gestational age at delivery (38.9 ± 2.3 weeks versus 39.1 ± 2.1 weeks, p = 0.517) between women with normal or poor OR. OR does not appear to affect pregnancy loss rates, incidence of congenital anomalies, birth weight, or gestational age at delivery after adjusting for maternal age.
Domain Adaptation: Learning Bounds and Algorithms

This paper addresses the general problem of domain adaptation which arises in a variety of applications where the distribution of the labeled sample available somewhat differs from that of the test data. Building on previous work by Ben-David et al. (2007), we introduce a novel distance between distributions, discrepancy distance, that is tailored to adaptation problems with arbitrary loss functions. We give Rademacher complexity bounds for estimating the discrepancy distance from finite samples for different loss functions. Using this distance, we derive new generalization bounds for domain adaptation for a wide family of loss functions. We also present a series of novel adaptation bounds for large classes of regularization-based algorithms, including support vector machines and kernel ridge regression based on the empirical discrepancy. This motivates our analysis of the problem of minimizing the empirical discrepancy for various loss functions for which we also give several algorithms. We report the results of preliminary experiments that demonstrate the benefits of our discrepancy minimization algorithms for domain adaptation.
Binary black holes and tori in AGN II. Can stellar winds constitute a dusty torus

In this second paper, in a series of two, we determine the properties of the stellar torus that we showed in the first paper to result as a product of two merging black holes. If the surrounding stellar cluster is as massive as the binary black hole, the torque acting on the stars ejects a fraction which extracts the binary's angular momentum. After the black holes coalesced on scales of ∼10 7 yr, a geometrically thick torus remained. In the present article we show that a certain fraction of the stars has winds, shaped into elongated tails by the central radiation pressure, which are optically thick for line of sights aligned with them. These stars are sufficiently numerous to achieve a covering factor of 1, so that the complete torus is optically thick. This patchy structured torus is then compared with observations. We find the parameters of such a torus to be just in the right range in order to explain the observed large column densities in AGN and their temporal variations on time scales of about a decade. Within this model the broad absorption line quasars can be interpreted as quasars seen at intermediate inclination angles, with the line of sight grazing the edge of the torus. The half-opening angle of the torus is wider for major mergers and thus correlates with the central luminosity, as has been suggested previously. In this picture the spin of the merged black hole is possibly dominated by the orbital angular momentum of the binary. Thus the spin of the merged black hole points into a new direction, and consequently the jet experiences a spin-flip according to the spin-paradigm. This re-orientation could be an explanation for the X-shaped radio galaxies, and the advancing of a new jet through the ambient medium for Compact Symmetric Objects.
The Role of the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor Nuclear Translocator (ARNT) in Hypoxic Induction of Gene Expression

Hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1), a DNA-binding complex implicated in the regulation of gene expression by oxygen, has been shown to consist of a heterodimer of two basic helix-loop-helix Per-AHR-ARNT-Sim (PAS) proteins, HIF-1α, and HIF-1β. One partner, HIF-1β, had been recognized previously as the aryl hydrocarbon receptor nuclear translocator (ARNT), an essential component of the xenobiotic response. In the present work, ARNT-deficient mutant cells, originally derived from the mouse hepatoma line Hepa1c1c7, have been used to analyze the role of ARNT/HIF-1β in oxygen-regulated gene expression. Two stimuli were examined: hypoxia itself and desferrioxamine, an iron-chelating agent that also activates HIF-1. Induction of the DNA binding and transcriptional activity of HIF-1 was absent in the mutant cells, indicating an essential role for ARNT/HIF-1β. Analysis of deleted ARNT/HIF-1β genes indicated that the basic, helix-loop-helix, and PAS domains, but not the amino or carboxyl termini, were necessary for function in the response to hypoxia. Comparison of gene expression in wild type and mutant cells demonstrated the critical importance of ARNT/HIF-1β in the hypoxic induction of a wide variety of genes. Nevertheless, for some genes a reduced response to hypoxia and desferrioxamine persisted in these mutant cells, clearly distinguishing ARNT/HIF-1β-dependent and ARNT/HIF-1β-independent mechanisms of gene activation by both these stimuli.
Reinforced Angle-Based Multicategory Support Vector Machines

The support vector machine (SVM) is a very popular classification tool with many successful applications. It was originally designed for binary problems with desirable theoretical properties. Although there exist various multicategory SVM (MSVM) extensions in the literature, some challenges remain. In particular, most existing MSVMs make use of k classification functions for a k-class problem, and the corresponding optimization problems are typically handled by existing quadratic programming solvers. In this article, we propose a new group of MSVMs, namely, the reinforced angle-based MSVMs (RAMSVMs), using an angle-based prediction rule with k − 1 functions directly. We prove that RAMSVMs can enjoy Fisher consistency. Moreover, we show that the RAMSVM can be implemented using the very efficient coordinate descent algorithm on its dual problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method is highly competitive in terms of computational speed, as well as classification prediction performance. Supplemental materials for the article are available online.
Reduced-Precision Strategies for Bounded Memory in Deep Neural Nets

This work investigates how using reduced precision data in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) affects network accuracy during classification. More specifically, this study considers networks where each layer may use different precision data. Our key result is the observation that the tolerance of CNNs to reduced precision data not only varies across networks, a well established observation, but also within networks. Tuning precision per layer is appealing as it could enable energy and performance improvements. In this paper we study how error tolerance across layers varies and propose a method for finding a low precision configuration for a network while maintaining high accuracy. A diverse set of CNNs is analyzed showing that compared to a conventional implementation using a 32-bit floating-point representation for all layers, and with less than 1% loss in relative accuracy, the data footprint required by these networks can be reduced by an average of 74% and up to 92%.