Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human RNASET2 derivatives as potential anti-angiogenic agents: actin binding sequence identification and characterization

Human RNASET2 (hRNASET2) has been demonstrated to exert antiangiogenic and antitumorigenic effects independent of its ribonuclease capacity. We suggested that RNASET2 exerts its antiangiogenic and antitumorigenic activities via binding to actin and consequently inhibits cell motility. We focused herein on the identification of the actin binding site of hRNASET2 using defined sequences encountered within the whole hRNASET2 protein. For that purpose we designed 29 different hRNASET2-derived peptides. The 29 peptides were examined for their ability to bind immobilized actin. Two selected peptides-A103-Q159 consisting of 57 amino acids and peptide K108-K133 consisting of 26 amino acids were demonstrated to have the highest actin binding ability and concomitantly the most potent anti-angiogenic activity. Further analyses on the putative mechanisms associated with angiogenesis inhibition exerted by peptide K108-K133 involved its location during treatment within the HUVE cells. Peptide K108-K133 readily penetrates the cell membrane within 10 min of incubation. In addition, supplementation with angiogenin delays the entrance of peptide K108-K133 to the cell suggesting competition on the same cell internalization route. The peptide was demonstrated to co-localize with angiogenin, suggesting that both molecules bind analogous cellular epitopes, similar to our previously reported data for ACTIBIND and trT2-50.
Correlation between Automatic Evaluation Metric Scores, Post-Editing Speed, and Some Other Factors

This paper summarises the results of a pilot project conducted to investigate the correlation between automatic evaluation metric scores and post-editing speed on a segment by segment basis. Firstly, the results from the comparison of various automatic metrics and post-editing speed will be reported. Secondly, further analysis is carried out by taking into consideration other relevant variables, such as text length and structures, and by means of multiple regression. It has been found that different automatic metrics achieve different levels and types of correlation with post-editing speed. We suggest that some of the source text characteristics and machine translation errors may be able to account for the gap between the automatic metric scores and post-editing speed, and may also help with understanding human post-editing process.
Characterization of Amoeboaphelidium protococcarum, an Algal Parasite New to the Cryptomycota Isolated from an Outdoor Algal Pond Used for the Production of Biofuel

Mass culture of algae for the production of biofuels is a developing technology designed to offset the depletion of fossil fuel reserves. However, large scale culture of algae in open ponds can be challenging because of incidences of infestation with algal parasites. Without knowledge of the identity of the specific parasite and how to control these pests, algal-based biofuel production will be limited. We have characterized a eukaryotic parasite of Scenedesmus dimorphus growing in outdoor ponds used for biofuel production. We demonstrated that as the genomic DNA of parasite FD01 increases, the concentration of S. dimorphus cells decreases; consequently, this is a highly destructive pathogen. Techniques for culture of the parasite and host were developed, and the endoparasite was identified as the Aphelidea, Amoeboaphelidium protococcarum. Phylogenetic analysis of ribosomal sequences revealed that parasite FD01 placed within the recently described Cryptomycota, a poorly known phylum based on two species of Rozella and environmental samples. Transmission electron microscopy demonstrated that aplanospores of the parasite produced filose pseudopodia, which contained fine fibers the diameter of actin microfilaments. Multiple lipid globules clustered and were associated with microbodies, mitochondria and a membrane cisternae, an arrangement characteristic of the microbody-lipid globule complex of chytrid zoospores. After encystment and attachment to the host cells, the parasite injected its protoplast into the host between the host cell wall and plasma membrane. At maturity the unwalled parasite occupied the entire host cell. After cleavage of the protoplast into aplanospores, a vacuole and lipids remained in the host cell. Amoeboaphelidium protococcarum isolate FD01 is characteristic of the original description of this species and is different from strain X-5 recently characterized. Our results help put a face on the Cryptomycota, revealing that the phylum is more diverse than previously understood and include some of the Aphelidea as well as Rozella species and potentially Microsporidia.
Neural control of chronic stress adaptation

Stress initiates adaptive processes that allow the organism to physiologically cope with prolonged or intermittent exposure to real or perceived threats. A major component of this response is repeated activation of glucocorticoid secretion by the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, which promotes redistribution of energy in a wide range of organ systems, including the brain. Prolonged or cumulative increases in glucocorticoid secretion can reduce benefits afforded by enhanced stress reactivity and eventually become maladaptive. The long-term impact of stress is kept in check by the process of habituation, which reduces HPA axis responses upon repeated exposure to homotypic stressors and likely limits deleterious actions of prolonged glucocorticoid secretion. Habituation is regulated by limbic stress-regulatory sites, and is at least in part glucocorticoid feedback-dependent. Chronic stress also sensitizes reactivity to new stimuli. While sensitization may be important in maintaining response flexibility in response to new threats, it may also add to the cumulative impact of glucocorticoids on the brain and body. Finally, unpredictable or severe stress exposure may cause long-term and lasting dysregulation of the HPA axis, likely due to altered limbic control of stress effector pathways. Stress-related disorders, such as depression and PTSD, are accompanied by glucocorticoid imbalances and structural/ functional alterations in limbic circuits that resemble those seen following chronic stress, suggesting that inappropriate processing of stressful information may be part of the pathological process.
Boltzmann Machines and Denoising Autoencoders for Image Denoising

Image denoising based on a probabilistic model of local image patches has been employed by various researchers, and recently a deep (denoising) autoencoder has been proposed by Burger et al. [2012] and Xie et al. [2012] as a good model for this. In this paper, we propose that another popular family of models in the field of deep learning, called Boltzmann machines, can perform image denoising as well as, or in certain cases of high level of noise, better than denoising autoencoders. We empirically evaluate the two models on three different sets of images with different types and levels of noise. Throughout the experiments we also examine the effect of the depth of the models. The experiments confirmed our claim and revealed that the performance can be improved by adding more hidden layers, especially when the level of noise is high.
Power diagrams and interaction processes for unions of discs

We study a flexible class of finite-disc process models with interaction between the discs. We let 𝒰 denote the random set given by the union of discs, and use for the disc process an exponential family density with the canonical sufficient statistic depending only on geometric properties of 𝒰 such as the area, perimeter, Euler-Poincaré characteristic, and the number of holes. This includes the quermass-interaction process and the continuum random-cluster model as special cases. Viewing our model as a connected component Markov point process, and thereby establishing local and spatial Markov properties, becomes useful for handling the problem of edge effects when only 𝒰 is observed within a bounded observation window. The power tessellation and its dual graph become major tools when establishing inclusion-exclusion formulae, formulae for computing geometric characteristics of 𝒰, and stability properties of the underlying disc process density. Algorithms for constructing the power tessellation of 𝒰 and for simulating the disc process are discussed, and the software is made public available.
Managing bandwidth in ATM networks with bursty traffic

Three approaches to the bandwidth management problem that have been proposed and studied by various groups are reviewed to illustrate three distinctly different approaches and identify their strengths and weaknesses. Based on these approaches, a bandwidth management and congestion control scheme for asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks that supports both point-to-point and one-to-many multicast virtual circuits is proposed. It is shown that the method can handle fully heterogeneous traffic and can be effectively implemented. The algorithm for making virtual circuit acceptance decisions is straightforward and fast, and the hardware mechanisms needed to implement buffer allocation and traffic monitoring at the user-network interface have acceptable complexities. It is also shown, through numerical examples, that the approach can achieve reasonable link efficiencies even in the presence of very bursty traffic. No advance reservation required, simplifying the interface between the network and the user and avoiding an initial network round trip delay before data can be transmitted. <<ETX>>
A layered edge-on circumstellar disk around HK Tau B

We present the first high angular resolution 1.4 mm and 2.7 mm continuum maps of the T Tauri binary system HK Tau obtained with the Plateau de Bure Interferometer. The contributions of both components are well disentangled at 1.4 mm and the star previously known to host an edge-on circumstellar disk, HK Tau B, is elongated along the disk's major axis. The optically bright primary dominates the thermal emission from the system at both wavelengths, confirming that it also has its own circumstellar disk. Its non-detection in scattered light images indicates that the two disks in this binary system are not parallel. Our data further indicate that the circumprimary disk is probably significantly smaller than the circumsecondary disk. We model the millimeter thermal emission from the circumstellar disk surrounding HK Tau B. We show that the disk mass derived from scattered light images cannot reproduce the 1.4 mm emission using opacities of the same population of submicron dust grains. However, grain growth alone cannot match all the observed properties of this disk. We propose that this disk contains three separate layers: two thin outer surfaces which contain dust grains that are very similar to those of the ISM, and a disk interior which is relatively massive and/or has experienced limited grain growth with the largest grains significantly smaller than 1 mm. Such a structure could naturally result from dust settling in a protoplanetary disk.
Coordination and allocation on land markets under increasing scale economies and heterogeneous actors - An experimental study

Economies of scale and scope are often not exploited in Western agriculture. A general reason is probably that various types of transaction costs limit coordination among farmers. A more specific explanation is that coordination on land markets or machinery cooperation is difficult to achieve when farmers are heterogeneous as some kind of price differentiation is necessary for a Pareto-superior solution. This paper investigates experimentally such a coordination game with heterogeneous agents using an example inspired by agricultural land markets. The experimental findings suggest that a Pareto-optimal solution may not be found when agents are heterogeneous. The findings provide evidence for market failures and cooperation deficits as reasons for unexploited economies of scale in agriculture. Our findings are consistent with coordination failures that appear to be driven by behavioural factors such as anchoring-and-adjustment, inequity aversion, and a reverse form of winner’s curse.
Rule-based pattern extractor and named entity recognition: A hybrid approach

Name Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the important tasks in Information Extraction (IE) research that has been flourishing for more than fifteen years ago. NER enables an IE system to recognize and classify information units in an unstructured text. This paper presents a Rule-based pattern extractor and a Semi-Supervised NER approach to automatically generate extraction pattern from a limited corpus and label the pre-defined entities in a collection of accident documents. Link Grammar parser and Stanford Part-of-Speech tagger are used in the pattern extractor to identify named entity and construct extraction pattern. The extraction pattern then feed to Semi-Supervised NER to categorize the entities into some predefined categories. Performance is evaluated using Exact Match evaluation and tested on two different entities-DATE and LOCATION. Using only two features, the system shows promising result.
Berkowitz and Clay , Initial Conditions and the Evolution of Institutions : Evidence from the American States Chapter 3 : Initial Conditions and State Legislatures

State legislatures were very important political institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They made most of the relevant law; shaped the legal system and more specifically the courts; and provided most of the public goods, to name just a few of their areas of responsibility. Even if state legislatures or groups within state legislatures had preferences regarding judicial independence, however, their ability to act on these preferences may have been limited by a number of factors. Some important examples include political competition in the state legislature and voter oversight with respect to the state legislature. Our goals in this chapter are twofold. Our first goal is to document some initial conditions that have been shown to be important in the United States or in other contexts. Our second goal is to demonstrate that levels of political competition in the state legislature, size, professionalism and voter oversight of the state legislature, and modification of the state constitution were systematically related to several of these initial conditions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although our measures are conceptually distinct, they can be thought of as different measures of the mythical creature – the state political system. So we expect the measures to exhibit broadly similar patterns with respect to initial conditions. In the next chapter, we describe and document the mechanism through which initial conditions likely acted on state legislatures. Because this chapter is in some sense a broad overview of 150 years of American state political history, it is useful to address some possible critiques by political historians
Risky Decision Making in a Computer Card Game: An Information Integration Experiment

Information integration in risky decision making was studied by using a functional measurement approach. Participants (N=84) played a computerized risky card game incorporating a within-subject design with the 3 factors (a) probability of negative or positive outcome, (b) amount of gain, and (c) amount of loss. Results on the group level showed mainly additive patterns of integration. Observed deviations from the general pattern could be explained more detailed by the results of the individual analyses: There was a wide range of different strategies from centration to additive and mixed additive-multiplicative strategies. The most frequent rules of integration were additive; pure multiplicative rules were rarely found. These findings give support to additive models in risky decision making. However, individual differences in risky decision making strategies appear to be a topic that deserves further study.
What Drives Public Sector Performance?

The aim of this paper is to estimate the relationship between public sector expenditure and public sector output. The literature in this field is relatively scarce due to difficulties in measuring public sector output. In this study we construct an index for public sector performance based on the structure presented by Afonso et al. (2005), for a panel of OECD countries between the years 2000-2010. We then estimate the effect of general government expenditure, as well as other variables, such as public debt and demographic structure, on public sector performance. We find that public sector expenditure is characterized by diminishing returns. Maximal public sector performance is achieved when the general government share of GDP is at 52%-60%, dependent on the control variables used. However, this range represents only an upper bound for optimal government size as it does not consider the opportunity cost of public expenditure. Moreover, increasing public expenditure beyond this range leads to lower public sector performance.
#Ausvotes: How twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election

While the 2007 Australian federal election was notable for the use of social media by the Australian Labor Party in campaigning, the 2010 election took place in a media landscape in which social media-especially Twitter-had become much more embedded in both political journalism and independent political commentary. This article draws on the computer-aided analysis of election-related Twitter messages, collected under the #ausvotes hashtag, to describe the key patterns of activity and thematic foci of the election's coverage in this particular social media site. It introduces novel metrics for analysing public communication via Twitter, and describes the related methods. What emerges from this analysis is the role of the #ausvotes hashtag as a means of gathering an ad hoc 'issue public'-a finding which is likely to be replicated for other hashtag communities.
A NEW LEVY BASED SHORT-RATE MODEL FOR THE FIXED INCOME MARKET AND ITS ESTIMATION WITH PARTICLE FILTER

Title of dissertation: A NEW LÉVY BASED SHORT-RATE MODEL FOR THE FIXED INCOME MARKET AND ITS ESTIMATION WITH PARTICLE FILTER Bing Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Dilip Madan Smith School of Business University of Maryland, College Park In this thesis two contributions are made to the area of mathematical finance. First, in order to explain the non-trivial skewness and kurtosis that is observed in the time-series data of constant maturity swap (CMS) rates, we employ the pure jump Lévy processes, i.e. in particular Variance Gamma process, to model the variation of unobservable economic factors. It is the first model to include Lévy dynamics in the short rate modeling. Specifically, the Vasicek [51] type of short rate framework is adopted, where the short rate is an affine combination of three mean-reverting state variables. Zero-coupon bonds and a few fixed income derivatives are developed under the model based on the transform method in Carr et al [13]. It is expected that the Lévy based short rate model would give more realistic explanations to the yield curve movements than Gaussian-based models. Second, the model parameters are estimated by the particle filter (PF) technique. The PF has not seen wide applications in the field of financial engineering, partly due to its stringent requirement on the computing capability. However, given cheap computing cost nowadays, the PF method is a flexible yet powerful tool in estimating state-space models with non-Gaussian dynamics, such as the Levybased models. To customize the PF algorithm to our model, the continuous-time Lévy short rate model is cast into the discrete format by first-order forward Euler approximation. The PF technique is used to retrieve values of the unobservable factors by sequentially using readily available market prices. The optimal set of model parameters are obtained by invoking the quasi-maximum likelihood estimation. A NEW LÉVY BASED SHORT-RATE MODEL FOR THE FIXED INCOME MARKET AND ITS ESTIMATION WITH PARTICLE FILTER
Interpretation of tuberculin skin-test results in the diagnosis of tuberculosis in children.

INTRODUCTION The tuberculin skin test is one of the most valuable tests for demonstrating tuberculous infection in both symptomatic and asymptomatic children. However, its application is often undermined by difficulties in interpretation of results arising from its low sensitivity and specificity. OBJECTIVES This review aimed to use the concept of induration distribution analysis to estimate the induration size demarcating positive from negative results in a group of children with suspected tuberculosis, and to compare this cut-off with available guidelines for interpretation of the Mantoux test in the diagnosis of tuberculosis in children. METHODS The results of Mantoux tests of children presenting with suspected tuberculosis over a 12-month period were retrospectively reviewed and plotted on a frequency distribution curve. The distribution was used to define a demarcation between positive and negative reactions. The resultant cut-off was compared with currently published guidelines for interpretation of the Mantoux test. RESULTS Two hundred (200) Mantoux results were analysed out of 202 records reviewed. Induration sizes ranged from 0 to 60 mm, with a mean of 9.4 mm. The induration distribution showed a bimodal pattern, with 103 patients showing no reaction (0 mm), and 96 (48%) patients with an induration size of (3) 5 mm, with the second mode at 15-19 mm. The demarcating antimode was at 5 mm. CONCLUSIONS The induration distribution showed that a cut-off induration size of 5 mm was appropriate for this group of patients. This was in agreement with currently published guidelines for the interpretation of the Mantoux test in the diagnosis of tuberculosis in children.
Mechanical Ventilation during Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation in Patients with Acute Severe Respiratory Failure

Conventionally, a substantial number of patients with acute respiratory failure require mechanical ventilation (MV) to avert catastrophe of hypoxemia and hypercapnia. However, mechanical ventilation per se can cause lung injury, accelerating the disease progression. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) provides an alternative to rescue patients with severe respiratory failure that conventional mechanical ventilation fails to maintain adequate gas exchange. The physiology behind ECMO and its interaction with MV were reviewed. Next, we discussed the timing of ECMO initiation based on the risks and benefits of ECMO. During the running of ECMO, the protective ventilation strategy can be employed without worrying about catastrophic hypoxemia and carbon dioxide retention. There is a large body of evidence showing that protective ventilation with low tidal volume, high positive end-expiratory pressure, and prone positioning can provide benefits on mortality outcome. More recently, there is an increasing popularity on the use of awake and spontaneous breathing for patients undergoing ECMO, which is thought to be beneficial in terms of rehabilitation.
Citizens and Consumers

New Public Management (NPM) puts a major emphasis on consumer sovereignty. Through consumer sovereignty, it is argued, public organizations will produce outputs more in line with what citizens want. This article analyses the implications, both theoretical and practical, of conceiving of citizens as customers. We discuss the features of citizenship, the ways in which the emerging customer focus impacts the role of citizen, how consumerism would and, in implementation, does work and the wider implications for democratic governance, particularly the effects on political and administrative leadership roles and leaders' political accountability, of the tendency to define citizens as customers of government agencies when conceptualizing their relationship to the state.