Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A bifunctional enzyme, with separate xylanase and beta(1,3-1,4)-glucanase domains, encoded by the xynD gene of Ruminococcus flavefaciens

Adjacent regions of a Ruminococcus flavefaciens 17 DNA fragment were found to encode xylanase and beta(1,3-1,4)-glucanase activities. Sequencing of this fragment showed that both activities are encoded by a single 2,406-bp open reading frame corresponding to the xynD gene. The predicted product has a characteristic signal sequence that is followed by an amino-terminal domain related to family G xylanases, while the carboxyterminal domain is related to beta(1,3-1,4)-glucanases from several other bacterial species. These two domains are connected by a region of unknown function that consists of 309 amino acids and includes a 30-amino-acid threonine-rich sequence. A polypeptide having a molecular weight of approximately 90,000 and exhibiting xylanase and beta(1,3-1,4)-glucanase activities was detected in Escherichia coli cells carrying the cloned xynD gene. This is one of the first cases in which a microbial polysaccharidase has been shown to carry separate catalytic domains active against different plant cell wall polysaccharides within the same polypeptide. xynD is one of a family of related genes in R. flavefaciens that encode enzymes having multiple catalytic domains, and the amino terminus of XYLD exhibits a high degree of similarity with the corresponding regions of another xylanase, XYLA, which carries two different xylanase catalytic domains.
Authoring a Second Chance in Life: Emotion and Transformational Processing Within Narrative Identity

In this article, narrating a second a chance in life after an identity-challenging experience is defined as a process of connecting the self to the negative emotional impact of the experience and using it as a narrative catalyst for positive self-transformation. I examined this process, labeled transformational processing, with quantitative and qualitative analyses from 2 studies, 1 on narratives of difficult life experiences in midlife women (Pals, 2006b), and the other on the formation of causal connections between past experiences and self-development within the life stories of midlife adults (Pals, McAdams, & Machado, 2006). Across these 2 studies, the transformational processing of difficult life experiences was shown to (a) be a product of 2 distinct narrative processes, exploratory narrative processing and coherent positive resolution; (b) predict healthy outcomes in adulthood including maturity, well-being, and physical health; and (c) involve acknowledging negative emotion in the past and connecting it to developing new ways of experiencing positive emotion in the present. In addition, I give special attention to alternatives to transformational processing and to the importance of taking a dynamic, temporal approach to narrative identity.
Grapevine Plasticity in Response to an Altered Microclimate: Sauvignon Blanc Modulates Specific Metabolites in Response to Increased Berry Exposure1

Grapevine responds to increased exposure in the bunch zone by up-regulating photoprotective carotenoids in the early developmental stages and volatile terpenoids in the later ripening stages of the berries in a proposed mechanism of antioxidant homeostasis maintenance. In this study, the metabolic and physiological impacts of an altered microclimate on quality-associated primary and secondary metabolites in grape (Vitis vinifera) ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ berries was determined in a high-altitude vineyard. The leaf and lateral shoot removal in the bunch zones altered the microclimate by increasing the exposure of the berries. The physical parameters (berry diameter and weight), primary metabolites (sugars and organic acids), as well as bunch temperature and leaf water potential were predominantly not affected by the treatment. The increased exposure led to higher levels of specific carotenoids and volatile terpenoids in the exposed berries, with earlier berry stages reacting distinctly from the later developmental stages. Plastic/nonplastic metabolite responses could be further classified to identify metabolites that were developmentally controlled and/or responded to the treatment in a predictable fashion (assessed over two consecutive vintages). The study demonstrates that grapevine berries exhibit a degree of plasticity within their secondary metabolites and respond physiologically to the increased exposure by increasing metabolites with potential antioxidant activity. Taken together, the data provide evidence that the underlying physiological responses relate to the maintenance of stress pathways by modulating antioxidant molecules in the berries.
Impact of adding maraviroc to antiretroviral regimens in patients with full viral suppression but impaired CD 4 recovery

We reviewed the effect of adding maraviroc on CD4 cell counts in nine patients on antiretroviral therapy with full viral suppression but impaired CD4 cell recovery. There were no significant differences in changes in CD4 cell count, percentage of CD4 cells, or in the ratio of CD4/CD8 cells at 30 days and 25 weeks of maraviroc therapy. Plasma endotoxin levels measured in four patients before and during maraviroc treatment also showed no significant differences.
The return to higher education: evidence from Romania

Education is one of the most important components of the human capital, and an important determinant of the personal income. Estimating the rate of return to education is a main topic of economic research. In this paper we analyzed the rate of return to higher education in Romania using the well-known Mincer equation. Besides the educational level and the number of years of experience on the labor market we also used a series of socio-demographic variables such as gender, civil status, the area of residence. We were interested mainly in calculating the rate of return to higher education, therefore we computed this rate for bachelor, master and doctoral degrees separately. We also investigated the rate of return to higher education on technical, science, economics, law, medicine, and arts fields. Our results showed that the rate of return to higher education has a greater value than most of the developed countries of EU and the field of higher education that brings the highest rate of return is medicine
Empowerment: An Idea Whose Time Has Come in Diabetes Education

We have learned much in the past 10 years about how to help patients to acquire diabetes-related knowledge and skills and how to use strategies to help patients change behaviors. However, the application ofknowledge and techniques should be guided by a relevant, coherent, educational philosophy. Empowerment offers a practical conceptual framework for diabetes patient education. Empowering patients provides them with the knowledge, skills, and responsibility to effect change and has the potential to promote overall health and maximize the use of available resources. It is an idea whose time has come for diabetes education.
Receiver and resource allocation optimization for uplink NOMA in 5G wireless networks

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a promising multiple access technique for 5G wireless networks. In uplink NOMA, more than one user can use the same subcarrier, which increases the system throughput and fairness. Due to the non-orthogonality among the users, joint processing is required at the receiver to retrieve the users' signals. In this paper, we propose solutions to optimize the receiver and the radio resource allocation of uplink NOMA. First, we propose an iterative multiuser detection and decoding (MUDD) to improve the performance of the multiuser detector by utilizing the information derived by the channel decoder. In addition, a novel subcarrier and power allocation algorithm is proposed for NOMA scheme that maximizes the users' weighted sum-rate. The link-level performance evaluation has shown that the proposed iterative MUDD approach brings about 4.5 dB and 9.8 dB performance improvements at block error rate equal to 10-2 comparing to conventional multiuser detection, for QPSK and 16QAM modulations, respectively. Furthermore, the system-level results show that the proposed resource allocation algorithm achieves the system spectral efficiency upper-bound, making NOMA significantly outperforms OFDMA in terms of spectral efficiency and fairness.
LDA/SVM driven nearest neighbor classification

Nearest neighbor classification relies on the assumption that class conditional probabilities are locally constant. This assumption becomes false in high dimensions with finite samples due to the curse of dimensionality. The nearest neighbor rule introduces severe bias under these conditions. We propose a locally adaptive neighborhood morphing classification method to try to minimize bias. We use local support vector machine teaming to estimate an effective metric for producing neighborhoods that are elongated along less discriminant feature dimensions and constricted along most discriminant ones. As a result, the class conditional probabilities can be expected to be approximately constant in the modified neighborhoods, whereby better classification performance can be achieved. The efficacy of our method is validated and compared against other competing techniques using a number of data sets.
Don't Secure Routing Protocols, Secure Data Delivery

Internet routing and forwarding are vulnerable to attacks and misconfigurations that compromise secure communications between end systems. With networks facing external attempts to compromise their routers [3] and insiders able to commandeer infrastructure, subversion of Internet communication is an ever more serious threat. Much prior work has proposed to improve communication security with secure interdomain routing protocols (e.g., S-BGP [10] and so-BGP [12]). We argue that solving the problem of secure routing is both harder and less effective than directly solving the core problems needed to communicate securely: end-to-end confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Secure routing protocols focus on providing origin authentication and path validity, identified as necessary by the IETF to secure BGP [7]. Unfortunately, these properties are both too little and too much: Secure routing is too little: As we discuss further in §2, secure routing does not completely address the core problems in secure communication. For example, it cannot prevent adversaries on the communication path from eavesdropping or modifying data traffic. Hosts must still use end-to-end cryptography to defend against these attacks. Similarly, secure routing cannot detect or prevent packet loss due to data-plane bugs, misconfigurations, or attacks. Secure routing is too much: The mechanisms behind secure routing, both cryptographic and administrative, are painfully heavy-weight. They require router hardware upgrades for cryptographic processing, timeconsuming maintenance of address registries, and a new public key infrastructure (PKI). Recognizing that a secure version of BGP will be difficult to deploy, yet provide only limited protection, we ask: what is the best division of labor between end systems (end hosts, or edge routers acting on behalf of end hosts) and the routing infrastructure to provide secure, robust communication? The answer, we argue, is that the routing infrastructure must only provide availability, i.e., enable an end system to find a working path to the valid destination as long as such a path exists. End systems can provide confidentiality and integrity as needed. Following this model, we present Availability Centric Routing (ACR), which is based on three principles:
Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology The Integration of Nanotechnology and Biology for Cell Engineering : Promises and Challenges Invited Article

Introduction: Successful tissue engineering strategies leading to the regeneration of a tissue depend on many factors, starting from the choice of appropriate scaffold material, tailoring the surface functionalities and topography, providing the correct amount of chemical and mechanical stimuli at the appropriate time points, and ensuring the uniform and precise localization of cells. Further challenges arise when more than one cell type has to be employed for the effective regeneration of an organ. Importance: Though the use of nanomaterials has improved tissue engineering, many pitfalls still exist that present a roadblock in the translation of tissue engineering strategies to clinical practice. Apart from employing different materials with distinct surface functionalities and mechanical properties, various strategies have been employed to manipulate the surface topography and chemistry of scaffolds to create a biomimetic microenvironment for effective tissue regeneration. Conclusion: This review provides information about the factors influencing tissue engineering, namely geometry, chemistry, mechanics and cells, and the emerging concepts that may well represent the future of regenerative medicine. Electrospinning techniques and their variants, self-assembly, cell-printing techniques and cell sheet engineering, have all been elaborated in detail. These novel techniques may serve to overcome the challenges currently faced in tissue engineering.
The Price of Luck

We find that the vast majority of students taking an advanced undergraduate finance course show a preference for luck in a classroom experiment. In Phase I of the experiment part of the students, group A, were asked to guess a coin toss five times in a row. In Phase II the rest of the students, group B, were given 10 EUR to bet on some of the Group A students taking a second go at guessing a sequence of five coin tosses (Phase III). Group B students' bets were by default allocated to the worse performing student in Phase I. Switching to better performing Group A students was costly. A total of 23 out of 28 students were willing to pay for switching and thus showed a preference for luck.
CHANGING PATTERNS OF NEWS CONSUMPTION AND PARTICIPATION

This study examines how the prevalence of news recommendation engines, such as the most-emailed stories list on the front page of the New York Times website, could change patterns of news consumption. The top five most-emailed articles from the New York Times website were collected for two 23-day periods. The content of the most-emailed list was found to differ both from the articles cued by editors in a traditional newspaper format and from patterns of individual online news browsing. Opinion, business and national news articles appear most frequently on the most-emailed list, and more than half of the total articles appeared on the list for multiple days. Counter-intuitive articles and articles that offered advice about life issues were significantly more likely to remain on the list for multiple days. The data suggest that the most-emailed list, part of a larger family of news recommendation engines (NREs), acts both as an aggregator of individual actions and as a new way for online users to navigate online information. In this second capacity, NREs demonstrate a public endorsement of particular content. This endorsement may both affect the articles to which news consumers are exposed and change their attitude towards these articles. NREs thus have the potential to change patterns of news consumption by allowing readers to communicate both with each other and, indirectly, with news institutions themselves.
Sexual Identity Confusion and Problem Behaviors in Adolescents

Abstract Sexual identity confusion can add to the stress of adolescence. We used gender development, identity formation, and risk/resilience theories to study factors that protect sexually confused youth from risks (e.g., suicidal thoughts, substance use, delinquency). This exploratory study was based on a large, representative sample: 2.4% (n = 299) of students were confused about their sexual identity. From the original sample, a random subsample (n = 278) reporting no sexual identity confusion was used as a comparison group. There were no significant differences between groups on demographic variables; the mean age was 14.5 years, and 61% of our sample was male. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) found that sexually confused youth reported more problem behaviors than non-confused youth, accounting for up to 30% of the variance (e.g., suicidal thoughts). Furthermore, students with more protective factors exhibited fewer externalizing behaviors (e.g., delinquency, substance use).
Underwater acoustic channel estimation via CS with prior information

This paper proposes estimation of underwater acoustic channel in the delay-Doppler domain under dynamic sea conditions. The sparsity of the channel in the delay-Doppler domain is exploited via advanced compressive sensing (CS) technique to estimate the channel. The proposed use of CS with prior information takes care of relatively dominant but stable slowly time-varying channel component and the rapidly fluctuating high energy transients. Simulation results are presented on prior estimated channel of SPACE08 experiment, considered as ground truth, for the validation of the theory presented.
Developmental Spans in Event Comprehension and Representation : Bridging Fictional and Actual Events

Contents: Preface. K. Nelson, Event Representations Then, Now, and Next. Part I: Establishing Event Representations. M.E. Young, Implicit Processes in the Development of Causal Knowledge: A Connectionist Model of the Use of Humean Cues. M.E. Arterberry, Development of Sensitivity to Spatial and Temporal Information. L. Baker-Ward, P.A. Ornstein, G.F. A. Principe, Revealing the Representation: Evidence From Children's Reports of Events. Part II: Event Understanding In Early Childhood. L.L. Travis, Goal-Based Organization of Event Memory in Toddlers. P.J. Bauer, S.S. Wewerka, Saying is Revealing: Verbal Expression of Event Memory in the Transition From Infancy to Early Childhood. R. Fivush, C.A. Haden, Narrating and Representing Experience: Preschoolers' Developing Autobiographical Accounts. N.L. Stein, M.D. Liwag, Children's Understanding, Evaluation, and Memory for Emotional Events. T. Trabasso, N.L. Stein, Narrating, Representing, and Remembering Event Sequences. E.P. Lorch, R.P. Sanchez, Children's Memory for Televised Events. Part III: Event Understanding in Children and Adults. T. Bourg, S. Stephenson, Comprehending Characters' Emotions: The Role of Event Categories and Causal Connectivity. P. van den Broek, Discovering the Cement of the Universe: The Development of Event Comprehension From Childhood to Adulthood. C.R. Fletcher, A. Briggs, B. Linzie, Understanding the Causal Structure of Narrative Events. D.L. Long, B.J. Oppy, M.R. Seely, A "Global-Coherence" View of Event Comprehension: Inferential Processing as Question Answering. T. Bourg, P.J. Bauer, P. van den Broek, Building the Bridges: The Development of Event Comprehension and Representation.
The Effects of Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Vaccination Intentions

The current studies investigated the potential impact of anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs, and exposure to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, on vaccination intentions. In Study 1, British parents completed a questionnaire measuring beliefs in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and the likelihood that they would have a fictitious child vaccinated. Results revealed a significant negative relationship between anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccination intentions. This effect was mediated by the perceived dangers of vaccines, and feelings of powerlessness, disillusionment and mistrust in authorities. In Study 2, participants were exposed to information that either supported or refuted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, or a control condition. Results revealed that participants who had been exposed to material supporting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories showed less intention to vaccinate than those in the anti-conspiracy condition or controls. This effect was mediated by the same variables as in Study 1. These findings point to the potentially detrimental consequences of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and highlight their potential role in shaping health-related behaviors.
¡°What I Love about Technology¡±: Older Adults and Mobile Communication Technologies

In a series of in-depth interviews, ten older adults described their use and experience with mobile technologies (e.g., E-readers and tablets). The results reveal that while older adults may not be leaders in new technology adoption, they do utilize mobile technology when they find it useful. The participants expressed both satisfaction and some frustration with their mobile devices. Participants suggested that the devices allowed them to partake in behaviors they might not be able to otherwise enjoy for a variety of physical and social reasons.
Item and source memory with emotional materials in young and older adults

Emotional experiences seem to be easier to remember than neutral ones, but whether memory for all aspects of an experience is improved by emotion remains unclear. Some researchers have argued that the influence of emotion is different on memory for item versus source information, whereas others have argued that emotion affects both similarly. Also, whether item and source memory are affected by emotion in older people in the same way as young people is currently unknown. This dissertation examined the relations among item and source memory, emotion, and aging. In Experiment 1, young people and older adults were asked to report memory for source information surrounding a real life event (i.e., how they heard about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001). No age differences were found in source memory, suggesting that emotion improves memory for contextual information, especially in older adults. This hypothesis was subsequently tested in a series of laboratory studies, in which item and source memory for emotional and neutral materials were examined in young people and older adults. Memory for emotional items was superior to memory for neutral items in both young and older adults, whereas the emotional content of the stimulus had no effect on source memory. However, source memory was improved when the source itself (tone of voice) was made emotional (in Experiments 3 and 4), although item memory was generally unaffected by this manipulation. Overall, item and source memory were poorer in older people compared to young, but emotion seemed to have a similar effect on both age groups. The dissociable influences of emotion on item and source memory suggest