Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bacillus subtilis RecU Holliday-junction resolvase modulates RecA activities

The Bacillus subtilis RecU protein is able to catalyze in vitro DNA strand annealing and Holliday-junction resolution. The interaction between the RecA and RecU proteins, in the presence or absence of a single-stranded binding (SSB) protein, was studied. Substoichiometric amounts of RecU enhanced RecA loading onto single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) and stimulated RecA-catalyzed D-loop formation. However, RecU inhibited the RecA-mediated three-strand exchange reaction and ssDNA-dependent dATP or rATP hydrolysis. The addition of an SSB protein did not reverse the negative effect exerted by RecU on RecA function. Annealing of circular ssDNA and homologous linear 3′-tailed double-stranded DNA by RecU was not affected by the addition of RecA both in the presence and in the absence of SSB. We propose that RecU modulates RecA activities by promoting RecA-catalyzed strand invasion and inhibiting RecA-mediated branch migration, by preventing RecA filament disassembly, and suggest a potential mechanism for the control of resolvasome assembly.
Towards Understanding How Speech Output Affects Navigation System Credibility

Navigation systems are widely used yet little is understood about how aspects of the interaction impact our assessment of these systems. Our work focuses on the speech output, exploring how accent and system errors affect our credibility judgements. Findings from a small-scale pilot study show that destination errors significantly affect user trust and competence assessments of a navigation system. People also rate navigation systems using speech output with a similar accent to their own as more trustworthy than a system using a different accent, irrespective of destination errors made. Future work looks to increase the scale of the study and add further conditions to explore the role of user nationality, accent and the geographical location being navigated on system credibility.
The "bilingual advantage" How does speaking two languages affect cognitive control and language processing abilities?

e report the results of a study designed to investigate whether having a high degree of proficiency in two languages impacts individuals' cognitive and linguistic abilities in ways that are relevant to Language and Intelligence Analysts (see attached article). In this study, monolinguals were compared to " balanced " bilinguals—native speakers of two languages who use both on a regular basis. The balanced bilinguals were shown to have better cognitive control and linguistic ambiguity resolution abilities, a result that may be attributed to their frequent switching between languages and their concomitant need to suppress the non-active language. The pattern of the bilinguals' results suggests that this cognitive advantage arises from an enhanced ability to detect conflict or interference in the environment, and, consequently, yields greater cognitive flexibility to deal with such conflict. These findings further strengthen the link between domain-general cognitive control and the ability to understand complex, degraded, or ambiguous language materials, and they highlight again the potential value of executive function training for analysts. Finally, the results underscore the importance of achieving high proficiency in a second language because of the broad-based cognitive benefits. This study was designed to achieve the following goals: (1) replicate and extend previous results showing that balanced bilinguals have superior cognitive control abilities compared to monolinguals; (2) characterize the nature of this so-called " bilingual advantage " by identifying the specific cognitive functions that are enhanced in bilinguals; and (3) determine whether this advantage extends to analyst-relevant tasks involving linguistic ambiguity resolution. Evidence from previous research has suggested that bilinguals enjoy certain cognitive advantages relative to their monolingual peers, but the nature of the bilingual advantage has been in dispute. Bilinguals typically outperform monolinguals on cognitive control tasks such as the Stroop task, which requires participants to name the color of the ink that a word appears in while ignoring (i.e., not reading) the word itself. For example, participants might have to respond " blue " to the word yellow printed in blue ink, which requires resolving the conflict between the color and word representations. This is a particularly challenging cognitive control task because one must override the dominant bias to read the word in order to perform an atypical color-naming (perceptual) task instead. One account of the bilingual advantage, the Inhibitory Control account, holds that bilinguals have an enhanced ability to suppress the interference that arises when there are competing sources of …
Party integration at the grassroots: evidence from Canada

ABSTRACT Party integration at the grassroots: evidence from Canada. Territory, Politics, Governance. Party organization and electoral competition are increasingly taking place within structures of multilevel governance. While a growing body of literature has recently emerged, quantifying linkages between national and sub-national political parties, considerably less attention has been devoted to understanding theoretically how parties cooperate with one another or the range of possibilities available to national and sub-national parties. Drawing upon an original survey of nearly 300 federal and provincial constituency associations in Canada’s largest province, this paper adds to the literature in two important ways. First, it systematically and empirically evaluates a recent typology of grassroots party integration. In doing so, it demonstrates the considerable variation that can be found between and within parties. Second, examining the direction of cooperation and collaboration, it provides evidence to challenge the view of multilevel party linkages as an upward flow. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the relationship, at least in the Canadian case, is much more reciprocal in nature.
The Natural Real Interest Rate and the Output Gap in the Euro Area: A Joint Estimation

The notion of a natural real rate of interest, due to Wicksell (1936), is widely used in current central bank research. The idea is that there exists a level at which the real interest rate would be compatible with output at its potential level and stationary inflation. Such a consept is of primary concern for monetary policy because it provides a benchmark for the monetary policy stance. This paper applies the method recently suggested by T. Laubach and J. C. Williams to jointly estimate the natural real interest rate and the output gap in the euro area using data from 1960. Our results suggest that the natural real rate of interest has declined gradually over the past 40 years. They also indicate that monetary policy in the euro area was on average stimulative during the 1960s and the 1970s, while it contributed to dampen the output gap and inflation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Skeleton-Based Abnormal Gait Detection

Human gait analysis plays an important role in musculoskeletal disorder diagnosis. Detecting anomalies in human walking, such as shuffling gait, stiff leg or unsteady gait, can be difficult if the prior knowledge of such a gait pattern is not available. We propose an approach for detecting abnormal human gait based on a normal gait model. Instead of employing the color image, silhouette, or spatio-temporal volume, our model is created based on human joint positions (skeleton) in time series. We decompose each sequence of normal gait images into gait cycles. Each human instant posture is represented by a feature vector which describes relationships between pairs of bone joints located in the lower body. Such vectors are then converted into codewords using a clustering technique. The normal human gait model is created based on multiple sequences of codewords corresponding to different gait cycles. In the detection stage, a gait cycle with normality likelihood below a threshold, which is determined automatically in the training step, is assumed as an anomaly. The experimental results on both marker-based mocap data and Kinect skeleton show that our method is very promising in distinguishing normal and abnormal gaits with an overall accuracy of 90.12%.
Entrepreneurship education: motivation and effort for pupils with special needs in Norwegian compulsory school*

Abstract Pupil enterprises are a widespread type of entrepreneurship education. In this working method, pupils start up, manage and close a business over short period of time. National and international policy documents claim that practical working methods through the use of pupil enterprises are beneficial to increase motivation by being a realistic and cross-curricular approach. This paper investigates whether this is the case for pupils who receive special education. No previous research has focused on the situation for this group of pupils when working with pupil enterprises. The data are collected from a survey with the participation of 1880 pupils in the 10th grade. Our econometric results indicate that participation in pupil enterprises has no particular impact on motivation or effort for pupils receiving special needs education. Even though there are many positive features with pupil enterprises and they offer a practical and realistic way of learning, we do not find evidence to support that pupil enterprises also have a positive effect on the general school motivation and effort. Thus, the political claim of the practical dimension as a solution to increase motivation for learning in school is not supported by our findings.
Partner tiering in display advertising

Display ads on the Internet are often sold by publishers to advertisers in bundles of thousands or millions of impressions over a particular time period. The ad delivery systems assign ads to pages on behalf of publishers to satisfy these contracts, and at the same time, try to maximize the overall quality of assignment. This is usually modeled in the literature as an online allocation problem, where contracts are represented by overall delivery constraints. However an important aspect of these contracts is missed by the classical formulation: a majority of these contracts are not between advertisers and publishers; a set of publishers is typically represented by a middle-man and advertisers buy inventory from the middle man. As publishers vary in quality and importance, advertisers prefer these publishers differently. Similarly, as the inventory of ads is limited, ad-delivery engine needs to prefer a high-quality publisher over a low quality publisher for supplying ads. We formulate this problem as a hierarchical online matching problem where each incoming impression has a level indicating its importance, and study its theoretical properties. We also design practical solutions to this problem and study their performance on real data sets.
The current state of dyslipidemia in Korean children and adolescents and its management in clinical practice

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death worldwide including Korea. The risk factors of CVD are known as positive family history of early CVD, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. Among those, dyslipidemia is one of modifiable risk factors. Dyslipidemia starts in childhood and progress to adulthood. Furthermore, dyslipidemia cause atherosclerosis and is closely related to other CVD risks. On the rationale that early identification and control of pediatric dyslipidemia will reduce the risk and severity of CVD in adulthood, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute guidelines expanded to universal screening for lipid levels. However, there was no guideline for lipid screening and management in Korean children and adolescents yet. This review deals with the rationale of early identification and control of pediatric dyslipidemia along with the current Korean status of pediatric dyslipidemia. This review also deals with how to screen, diagnosis, and treatment of pediatric dyslipidemia.
User-centric privacy-preserving statistical analysis of ubiquitous health monitoring data

In this paper, we propose a user-centric software architecture for managing Ubiquitous Health Monitoring Data (UHMD) generated from wearable sensors in a Ubiquitous Health Monitoring System (UHMS), and examine how these data can be used within privacy-preserving distributed statistical analysis. Two are the main goals of our approach. First, to enhance the privacy of patients. Second, to decongest the Health Monitoring Center (HMC) from the enormous amount of biomedical data generated by the users’ wearable sensors. In our solution personal software agents are used to receive and manage the personal medical data of their owners. Moreover, the personal agents can support privacy-preserving distributed statistical analysis of the health data. To this end, we present a cryptographic protocol based on secure multi-party computations that accept as input current or archived values of users’ wearable sensors. We describe a prototype implementation that performs a statistical analysis on a community of independent personal agents. Finally, experiments with up to several hundred agents confirm the viability and the effectiveness of our approach.
Closeness: A New Privacy Measure for Data Publishing

The k-anonymity privacy requirement for publishing microdata requires that each equivalence class (i.e., a set of records that are indistinguishable from each other with respect to certain “identifying” attributes) contains at least k records. Recently, several authors have recognized that k-anonymity cannot prevent attribute disclosure. The notion of ℓ-diversity has been proposed to address this; ℓ-diversity requires that each equivalence class has at least ℓ well-represented (in Section 2) values for each sensitive attribute. In this paper, we show that ℓ-diversity has a number of limitations. In particular, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent attribute disclosure. Motivated by these limitations, we propose a new notion of privacy called “closeness. ” We first present the base model t-closeness, which requires that the distribution of a sensitive attribute in any equivalence class is close to the distribution of the attribute in the overall table (i.e., the distance between the two distributions should be no more than a threshold t). We then propose a more flexible privacy model called (n,t)-closeness that offers higher utility. We describe our desiderata for designing a distance measure between two probability distributions and present two distance measures. We discuss the rationale for using closeness as a privacy measure and illustrate its advantages through examples and experiments.
Knowing Obama: How High School Students of Color Learn About the 44th President

Abstract:Drawing from a theory of racial literacy and literature on the post-racial phenomenon after the 2008 election, this case study examines how high school students of color have learned about Barack Obama as a racial and political figure. Findings suggest that schools can be unfriendly spaces for learning about these topics, with history and social studies courses failing to address Barack Obama or the election in a meaningful way. However, students pick up rich, though scattered, information through out-of-school sources such as family, community, and media. These findings suggest a need for greater consideration of Obama-related content in formal curriculum. The findings also imply that teachers must provide opportunities for students to contextualize, extend, and make sense of their out-of-school learning about race and Obama in the academic safety of the school environment.
Lovastatin fails to improve motor performance and survival in methyl-CpG-binding protein2-null mice

Previous studies provided evidence for the alteration of brain cholesterol homeostasis in 129.Mecp2-null mice, an experimental model of Rett syndrome. The efficacy of statins in improving motor symptoms and prolonging survival of mutant mice suggested a potential role of statins in the therapy of Rett syndrome. In the present study, we show that Mecp2 deletion had no effect on brain and reduced serum cholesterol levels and lovastatin (1.5 mg/kg, twice weekly as in the previous study) had no effects on motor deficits and survival when Mecp2 deletion was expressed on a background strain (C57BL/6J; B6) differing from that used in the earlier study. These findings indicate that the effects of statins may be background specific and raise important issues to consider when contemplating clinical trials. The reduction of the brain cholesterol metabolite 24S-hydroxycholesterol (24S-OHC) found in B6.Mecp2-null mice suggests the occurrence of changes in brain cholesterol metabolism and the potential utility of using plasma levels of 24S-OHC as a biomarker of brain cholesterol homeostasis in RTT. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.22409. 001
Urinary purines in leukemia.

Urinary purine excretion has been determined for four normal subjects, for thirteen patients with different types of acute and chronic leukemia, and for one man with mycosis fungoides by means of paper chromatography. Differentiation between types of leukemia, based on purine excretion, was not conclusive. Increases in 1-methylhypoxanthine and 8-hydroxy-7-methylguanine in nearly all patients, and 7-methylguanine excretion in one-third of the patients, suggest that methylation of purines is increased in patients with leukemia. Since treatment with methotrexate diminished the excretion of these compounds somewhat, it is possible that the methylation is folic-acid dependent. Increases in adenine and 6-succinoaminopurine were each observed in half the patients. Spot “W” was increased in one-third of the patients. No consistent treatment effects on the excretion of these compounds were seen. Hypoxanthine and xanthine excretion was usually normal. High or low excretions were seen in single cases of different types of leukemia. No consistent relationship to excretion of uric acid for these or any other compounds was seen. Two ultraviolet-absorbing spots, “M” and “P,” not previously described in urine were repeatedly observed. Neither was identified, but they are presumed to be purines or purine derivatives. Spot “P” has an unusual and characteristic spectrum which appears to be similar to that reported by others for a component of a peptide-nucleotide complex from Saccharomyces formosensis . A total of twelve spots with spectra which are similar to but not identical with known purine spectra were recovered from the urine of three patients; these unknown compounds might be purines.
Association Norms of German Noun Compounds

This paper introduces association norms of German noun compounds as a lexical semantic resource for cognitive and computational linguistics research on compositionality. Based on an existing database of German noun compounds, we collected human associations to the compounds and their constituents within a web experiment. The current study describes the collection process and a part-of-speech analysis of the association resource. In addition, we demonstrate that the associations provide insight into the semantic properties of the compounds, and perform a case study that predicts the degree of compositionality of the experiment compound nouns, as relying on the norms. Applying a comparatively simple measure of association overlap, we reach a Spearman rank correlation coefficient of rs=0.5228; p<000001, when comparing our predictions with human judgements.
Concurrent B-trees with Lock-free Techniques

B-trees and their variants are efficient data structures for finding records in a large collection (e.g., databases). The efficiency of B-trees increases when a number of users can manipulate the tree simultaneously. Many algorithms have been developed over the last three decades to achieve both concurrency and consistency in B-trees. However, current lock-based concurrency-control techniques limit concurrency. Moreover, lock-based B-trees suffer from certain negative scheduling anomalies, such as deadlock, convoying and priority inversion. Lock-free concurrency-control techniques using, for example, Compare And Swap (CAS) can provide improved concurrent access to data structures including B-trees and other search structures. Besides this, correctly designed lock-free techniques prevent deadlock, convoying and priority inversion. Considering the advantages of lock-free techniques for other concurrent data structures, we develop a lock-free B-tree to support high performance concurrent in-memory searching in a Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) parallel computing environment. The use and parallelization of B-trees have both been widely explored in the past—primarily for application to database implementation and, hence, disk-based operations. Moving B-trees into memory for use in new online searching applications, however, fundamentally changes the characteristics of managing them and will allow us to effectively exploit the use of lock-free techniques, something that has previously not been applicable to B-trees.
In vitro transformation of epidermal cells from newborn mice.

Cultures of epidermal cells obtained from newborn BALB/c mice were used to study in vitro transformation of epithelial cells. One-day-old primary cultures plated at 106 cells/ml were treated for 2 days with various concentrations of N -methyl- N ′-nitro- N -nitrosoguanidine, 3-methylcholanthrene, and 3-methylcholanthrene-11,12-epoxide. Untreated newborn epidermal cells both divide and keratinize in vitro in Medium 199 supplemented with 10% fetal calf serum. After a few weeks the cells enlarge, show signs of senescence, and then die after about 3 months in vitro . The epidermal cells treated with N -methyl- N ′-nitro- N -nitrosoguanidine, 3-methylcholanthrene, or 3-methylcholanthrene-11,12-epoxide went through a similar crisis, appearing as though they too were going to die at 3 months. However, small populations of the remaining cells began to proliferate into colonies that soon grew to confluence. These epithelial cells were characterized by rapid growth, loss of visible keratinization, and subculturability, having been passaged 12 times, in contrast to untreated cells, which are not subculturable. Electron microscope studies did not reveal any true desmosomes, but junctional complexes were present in all of the cell strains examined. The injection of 106 cells from the various cell strains into athymic “nude” or syngeneic mice resulted in rapidly growing solid tumors, which were characterized as highly anaplastic “undifferentiated” tumors.
Remote Sensing Images Super-resolution Based on Sparse Dictionaries and Residual Dictionaries

In this paper, a sensing image super-resolution (SR) reconstruction method is proposed. Sparse dictionary dealing with remote sensing image SR problem is introduced in this work. The sparse dictionary is based on a sparsity model where the dictionary atoms have sparse representation over a basic dictionary. The sparse dictionary consists of two parts: basic dictionary and atom representation matrix. The sparse dictionary leads to compact representation and it is both adaptive and efficient. Furthermore, compared with conventional SR methods, two dictionary pairs, i.e. primitive sparse dictionary pair and residual sparse dictionary pair, are proposed. The primitive sparse dictionary pair is learned to reconstruct initial high-resolution (HR) remote sensing image from a single low-resolution (LR) input. However, the initial HR remote sensing image loses some details compare with the corresponding original HR image completely. Therefore, residual sparse dictionary pair is learned to reconstruct residual information. The proposed method is tested on remote sensing images, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can provide substantial improvement in resolution of remote sensing images, and the results are superior in quality to the results produced by other methods.