Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing Microbiome Sampling Methods in a Wild Mammal: Fecal and Intestinal Samples Record Different Signals of Host Ecology, Evolution

The gut microbiome is a community of host-associated symbiotic microbes that fulfills multiple key roles in host metabolism, immune function, and tissue development. Given the ability of the microbiome to impact host fitness, there is increasing interest in studying the microbiome of wild animals to better understand these communities in the context of host ecology and evolution. Human microbiome research protocols are well established, but wildlife microbiome research is still a developing field. Currently, there is no standardized set of best practices guiding the collection of microbiome samples from wildlife. Gut microflora are typically sampled either by fecal collection, rectal swabbing, or by destructively sampling the intestinal contents of the host animal. Studies rarely include more than one sampling technique and no comparison of these methods currently exists for a wild mammal. Although some studies have hypothesized that the fecal microbiome is a nested subset of the intestinal microbiome, this hypothesis has not been formally tested. To address these issues, we examined guano (feces) and distal intestinal mucosa from 19 species of free-ranging bats from Lamanai, Belize, using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to compare microbial communities across sample types. We found that the diversity and composition of intestine and guano samples differed substantially. In addition, we conclude that signatures of host evolution are retained by studying gut microbiomes based on mucosal tissue samples, but not fecal samples. Conversely, fecal samples retained more signal of host diet than intestinal samples. These results suggest that fecal and intestinal sampling methods are not interchangeable, and that these two microbiotas record different information about the host from which they are isolated.
On the common mass scale of the Milky Way satellites

We use a hybrid approach that combines high-resolution simulations of the formation of a Milky Way-like halo with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to study the mass content of dwarf galaxies in the concordance Lambda cold dark matter cosmology. We find that the mass within 600 pc of dark matter haloes hosting luminous satellites has a median value of similar to 3.2 x 10(7) M(circle dot) with very little object-to-object scatter. In contrast, the present-day total luminosities of the model satellites span nearly five orders of magnitude. These findings are in very good agreement with the results recently reported in the literature for the dwarf spheroidal galaxies of the Milky Way. In our model, dwarf irregular galaxies like the Small Magellanic Cloud, are predicted to have similar or slightly larger dark matter mass within 600 pc.
Unsupervised Lesion Detection in Brain CT using Bayesian Convolutional Autoencoders

Normally, lesions are detected using supervised learning techniques that require labelled training data. We explore the use of Bayesian autoencoders to learn the variability of healthy tissue and detect lesions as unlikely events under the normative model. As a proof-of-concept, we test our method on registered 2D mid-axial slices from CT imaging data. Our results indicate that our method achieves best performance in detecting lesions caused by bleeding compared to baselines.
Evaluating the predictability of conformational switching in RNA

MOTIVATION There are various cases where the biological function of an RNA molecule involves a reversible change of conformation. paRNAss is a software approach to the prediction of such structural switching in RNA. It is based on three hypotheses about the secondary structure space of a switching RNA molecule that can be evaluated by RNA folding and structure comparison. In the positive case, the predicted structural switching must be verified experimentally. RESULTS After reviewing the strategy used in paRNAss, we present recent improvements on the algorithmic level of the approach, and the results of an evaluation procedure, comprising 1500 RNA sequences. It could be shown that the paRNAss approach performs well on known examples for conformational switching in RNA. The overall number of positive predictions was small, whereas for human 3' UTRs, representing regulatory important regions, it was substantially higher than for arbitrary natural and random sequences. AVAILABILITY paRNAss is available as a Web service at http://bibiserv.techfak. uni-bielefeld.de/parnass SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Detailed information on the analyses summarized in Table 1 can be found at http://bibiserv.techfak. uni-bielefeld.de/parnass/examples.html
The giant arc statistics in the three year WMAP cosmological model

We use high-resolution N -body simulations to investigate the optical depth of giant arcs with length-to-width ratio larger than 7.5 and 10 in the ‘standard’ ΛCDM model with σ 8 = 0 . 9 and Ω m , 0 = 0 . 3 and a model based on three-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. We ﬁnd that, in dark-matter only simulations, the lensing probability in the three-year WMAP model (with σ 8 = 0 . 74 and Ω m , 0 = 0 . 238) decreases by a factor of ∼ 6 compared with that in the ‘standard’ ΛCDM model. The eﬀects of baryonic cooling, star formation and feedbacks are uncertain, but we argue that baryons will only increase the the lensing cross-section by a moderate factor, ∼ 2. We conclude that the low central value of σ 8 and Ω m , 0 preferred by the WMAP three-year data may be too low to be compatible with observations if conventional assumptions of the background source population are correct.
Resource-Management for Vehicular Real-Time Application under Hard Reliability Constraints

In this paper, we design and test a full distributed and scalable resource-management scheduler for Vehicular Real-Time applications. We dynamically allocate the access time window (at the RoadSide Units) and the access rate and traffic flows (at the Vehicular Clients) under hard reliability collision constraints. We provide the optimal memoryless scheduler for network utility maximization, showing as it presents no loss in the network average utility with respect to not real-time soft reliability schedulers. Finally, the proposed scheduler exploits an ad-hoc designed soft-input/soft-output data fusion algorithm, able to supply in real-time reliable context-information, even in the presence of fading-affected and intermittent vehicular-to-infrastructure connectivity.
LMSO: A Curry-Howard Approach to Church's Synthesis via Linear Logic

We propose LMSO, a proof system inspired from Linear Logic, as a proof-theoretical framework to extract finite-state stream transducers from linear-constructive proofs of omega-regular specifications. We advocate LMSO as a stepping stone toward semi-automatic approaches to Church's synthesis combining computer assisted proofs with automatic decisions procedures. LMSO is correct in the sense that it comes with an automata-based realizability model in which proofs are interpreted as finite-state stream transducers. It is moreover complete, in the sense that every solvable instance of Church's synthesis problem leads to a linear-constructive proof of the formula specifying the synthesis problem.
Chisel

The accuracy of an approximate computation is the distance between the result that the computation produces and the corresponding fully accurate result. The reliability of the computation is the probability that it will produce an acceptably accurate result. Emerging approximate hardware platforms provide approximate operations that, in return for reduced energy consumption and/or increased performance, exhibit reduced reliability and/or accuracy. We present Chisel, a system for reliability- and accuracy-aware optimization of approximate computational kernels that run on approximate hardware platforms. Given a combined reliability and/or accuracy specification, Chisel automatically selects approximate kernel operations to synthesize an approximate computation that minimizes energy consumption while satisfying its reliability and accuracy specification. We evaluate Chisel on five applications from the image processing, scientific computing, and financial analysis domains. The experimental results show that our implemented optimization algorithm enables Chisel to optimize our set of benchmark kernels to obtain energy savings from 8.7% to 19.8% compared to the fully reliable kernel implementations while preserving important reliability guarantees.
An update on the toxicity of Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer's disease is characterized histopathologically by deposition of insoluble forms of the peptide Abeta and the protein tau in brain. Abeta is the principal component of amyloid plaques and tau of neurofibrillary tangles. Familial cases of AD are associated with causal mutations in the gene encoding the amyloid precursor protein, APP, from which the amyloidogenic Abeta peptide is derived, and this supports a role for Abeta in disease. Abeta can promote tau pathology and at the same time its toxicity is also tau-dependent. Abeta can adopt different conformations including soluble oligomers and insoluble fibrillar species present in plaques. We discuss which of these conformations exert toxicity, highlight molecular pathways involved and discuss what has been learned by applying functional genomics.
Nosocomial Burkholderia cepacia infections in a Turkish university hospital: a five-year surveillance.

BACKGROUND Burkholderia cepacia has the potential to cause fatal infections in ICUs, and multidrug resistance makes them a serious threat in hospital settings. The aim of this study was to evaluate the epidemiology of B. cepacia infections in our hospital. METHODOLOGY The incidence, clinical characteristics, antimicrobial susceptibility, and outcomes of nosocomial B. cepacia infections during a five-year period were retrospectively analysed according to the infection control committee records. RESULTS A total of 39 cases with nosocomial B. cepacia infection were included in the study. B. cepacia was identified from 0.7% of the nosocomial isolates. Its incidence was 0.26 per 1,000 admissions with 53.8% crude mortality rate. The most frequent nosocomial B. cepacia infection was pneumonia (58.9%), followed by bloodstream infections (25.6%), surgical site infections (7.6%), urinary tract infections, (5.1%), and skin-soft tissue infections (2.5%). Nosocomial B. cepacia infections were most commonly observed in intensive care units (61.5%). The most active antimicrobial agents were piperacillin-tazobactam, cefoperazone-sulbactam, and carbapenems. CONCLUSIONS The incidence of nosocomial B. cepacia infections was rare in our hospital, and no outbreak was detected during the study period. However, infections caused by B. cepacia should be taken into consideration because of their high mortality due to multidrug resistance in ICU settings.
6LoWPAN fragmentation attacks and mitigation mechanisms

6LoWPAN is an IPv6 adaptation layer that defines mechanisms to make IP connectivity viable for tightly resource-constrained devices that communicate over low power, lossy links such as IEEE 802.15. 4. It is expected to be used in a variety of scenarios ranging from home automation to industrial control systems. To support the transmission of IPv6 packets exceeding the maximum frame size of the link layer, 6LoWPAN defines a packet fragmentation mechanism. However, the best effort semantics for fragment transmissions, the lack of authentication at the 6LoWPAN layer, and the scarce memory resources of the networked devices render the design of the fragmentation mechanism vulnerable. In this paper, we provide a detailed security analysis of the 6LoWPAN fragmentation mechanism. We identify two attacks at the 6LoWPAN design-level that enable an attacker to (selectively) prevent correct packet reassembly on a target node at considerably low cost. Specifically, an attacker can mount our identified attacks by only sending a single protocol-compliant 6LoWPAN fragment. To counter these attacks, we propose two complementary, lightweight defense mechanisms, the content chaining scheme and the split buffer approach. Our evaluation shows the practicality of the identified attacks as well as the effectiveness of our proposed defense mechanisms at modest trade-offs.
The Effect of Distractions on Online Consumer Satsifaction

The prevailing wisdom in web design literature cautions against the use of distracting website features; such as animated banners, pop-ups and floating advertisements, as they have the potential to cause annoyance and disrupt the process of pre-purchase evaluation in the context of online shopping. Recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology however, have suggested that a systematic and conscious process of evaluation prior to making a purchase may not always be ideal. In particular, the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis of the theory of unconscious thought postulates that the quality of conscious decision making deteriorates as decision complexity increases such that for complex decisions, unconscious thought will outperform conscious thought. If the hypothesis holds true in the context of online shopping for complex products, and if the positive effect of better decision quality that results from the use of distracting website features can overcome the negative effect of annoyance on customer satisfaction, then much of what we assume or think we know about website design is invalidated. The enormity of the theoretical and practical implications of such a notion forms the motivation for this research-in-progress article, and an experiment is proposed to test the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis in the context of online shopping.
Eyepass - eye-stroke authentication for public terminals

Authentication on public terminals e.g. on ATMs and ticket vending machines is a common practice. Due to the weaknesses of the traditional authentication approaches PIN and password, it is possible that other people gain access to the authentication information and thus to the users' personal data. This is mainly due to the physical interaction with the terminals, which enables various manipulations on these devices. In this paper, we present EyePass, an authentication mechanism based on PassShape and eye-gestures that has been created to overcome these problems by eliminating the physical connection to the terminals. EyePass additionally assists the users by providing easy-to-remember PassShapes instead of PINs or passwords. We present the concept, the prototype and the first evaluations performed. Additionally, the future work on the evaluation is outlined and expected results are discussed.
AdS3 black holes and a stringy exclusion principle

The duality relating near-horizon microstates of black holes obtained as orbifolds of a subset of AdS3 to the states of a conformal field theory is analyzed in detail. The SL(2,R)L? SL(2,R)R invariant vacuum on AdS3 corresponds to the NS-NS vacuum of the conformal field theory. The effect of the orbifolding is to produce a density matrix, the temperature and entropy of which coincide with the black hole. For string theory examples the spectrum of chiral primaries agrees with the spectrum of multi-particle BPS states for particle numbers less than of order the central charge. An upper bound on the BPS particle number follows from the upper bound on the U(1) charge of chiral primaries. This is a stringy exclusion principle which cannot be seen in perturbation theory about AdS3.
Her2/neu Expression Predicts the Response to Antiaromatase Neoadjuvant Therapy in Primary Breast Cancer

Purpose: Many studies suggest that Her2/neu play an important role in neoadjuvant endocrine therapy. This study aimed to determine whether the level of Her2/neu expression in advanced breast cancer changes after antiaromatase neoadjuvant treatment, as well as to identify the relationship between Her2/neu expression and response to this kind of therapy. Experimental Design: Thirty-six postmenopausal patients with hormonal receptor-positive primary breast cancer were included in a study of three monthly cycles of neoadjuvant endocrine therapy with either Aromasin (25 mg daily) or Femara (2.5 mg daily). Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for Her2/neu were conducted both on pretreatment biopsies and surgical tumors. Results: Using IHC, 5 of 36 (13.9%) of the patients had a Her2/neu overexpression after treatment, as compared with 16 of 36 (44.4%) before. Meanwhile, there was no change in 21 (58.3%) patients, and through FISH, there was a change from amplification to no amplification in 15 (41.7%) patients. The response rate to the treatment was 75% for Her2/neu (+) tumors and 35% for Her2/neu (−) tumors (P = 0.017) while FISH was performed. The response rate was also significantly affected by the decrease in Her2/neu status after the treatment, with 73% of the tumors showing decreased Her2/neu expression and with 38% of the tumors showing no change of Her2/neu expression (P = 0.037). Conclusions: Using both IHC and FISH, advanced breast cancers show statistical evidence of decreasing incidence of Her2/neu expression after antiaromatase neoadjuvant treatment. Our data also suggest that Her2/neu expression and its change during the treatment might be predictive markers for this kind of therapy.
Supraglottic Kaposi's Sarcoma in HIV-Negative Patients: Case Report and Literature Review

This paper presents a case report of an HIV-negative, supraglottic Kaposi's sarcoma patient. The 80-year-old male patient was admitted with complaints of hoarseness, difficulty in swallowing, and a stinging sensation in his throat for approximately six months. The endoscopic larynx examination revealed a lesion which had completely infiltrated the epiglottis, reached right aryepiglottic fold, was vegetating, pink and purple in color, multilobular, fragile, and shaped like a bunch of grapes, and partially blocked the bleeding airway passage. The case was discussed by the hospital's head-neck cancer committee and a surgery decision was made. A tracheotomy was performed under local anesthesia before the operation due to respiratory distress and endotracheal intubation difficulty. Direct laryngoscopy showed that the mass was limited in the supraglottic area, had invaded the entire left aryepiglottic fold and one-third of the front right aryepiglottic fold, and completely covered epiglottis. It should be remembered that although rare, Kaposi's sarcoma may be encountered in larynx malignancy cases. Disease-free survival may be achieved through local excision and postoperative radiotherapy.
Molecular Mechanisms of Long-Term Potentiation in the Insular Cortex In Vivo

We have investigated molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity in the pathway between two forebrain structures important for taste learning, the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the insular cortex. We report here that in vivo long-term potentiation (LTP) induced by BLA stimulation requires functional NMDA receptors and is modulated by muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. In addition, LTP results in the activation of cortical extracellular regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2) and is blocked by inhibitors of ERK1/2 activation. Previous findings demonstrated the involvement of the same molecular mechanisms in the same cortical area during novel taste learning. The results demonstrate that both synaptic and behavioral plasticity share common molecular mechanisms in the insular cortex.
Differential modulation using space-time block codes

We consider a space-time differential modulation scheme where neither the transmitter nor the receiver has to know the channel. Our scheme is based on the theory of unitary space-time block codes. Compared to the existing differential modulation schemes for multiple antennas our scheme has a much smaller computational complexity. Moreover, our codes have a higher coding gain and lower bit error rate than the codes proposed by other researchers.
Research on the Butt Lifting Effect of Tight Jeans Based on Changing Structural Parameters in Pattern Design

The purpose of this paper was to improve the butt lifting effect of tight jeans based on changing parameters of pattern by CAD. in the scope of research, body measurements were carried out and three kinds of hip shape (flat, normal and plump) were identified with K-Mean Cluster Analysis according to the hip convex angle. then butt lifting effect of jeans was discussed through changing the back crutch angle and the style line angle of yoke. the corresponding sample jeans were fitted by 15 subjects of three hip shapes and evaluated by both subjects and 15 specialist people in fashion field. It was concluded that the butt lifting effect could be enhanced by increasing the back crutch angle and decreasing the style line angle of yoke. the preferable back crutch angle was 20°~22°, which was conformed to the average hip convex angle (21.3°) of young women, and the suitable style line angle was 74°. the result has been applied in jeans production manufacture.
Motivations for swap-covered foreign currency borrowing

We explore the motivations for borrowers to raise foreign currency debt and swap the proceeds into local currency, rather than borrowing the local currency directly. The growing, and in some markets large, volume of such opportunistic swap-covered borrowing, suggests that it can be a cost-effective means of raising local currency funding, yet the motivation to borrow this way is not adequately explained in the literature. We consider several market frictions that can explain this borrowing behaviour, focusing on potential differences in the market access of two natural counterparties to a swap: residents issuing foreign currency bonds and non-residents issuing local currency bonds. Based on a sample of 13 Asia-Pacific countries, we find that the characteristics of foreign currency bonds issued by residents and local currency bonds issued by non-residents differ in ways that are consistent with these issuers overcoming market limitations and arbitraging cost differentials.
Time Lotteries and Stochastic Impatience

We study preferences over lotteries in which both the prize and the payment date are uncertain. In particular, atime lotteryis one in which the prize is fixed but the date is random. With Expected Discounted Utility, individuals must be riskseekingover time lotteries (RSTL). In an incentivized experiment, however, we find that almost all subjects violate this property. Our main contributions are theoretical. We first show that within a very broad class of models, which includes many forms of nonexpected utility and time discounting, it is impossible to accommodate even a single violation of RSTL without also violating a property we termed Stochastic Impatience, a risky counterpart of standard Impatience. We then present two positive results. If one wishes to maintain Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated by keeping Independence within periods while relaxing it across periods. If, instead, one is willing to forego Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated with a simple generalization of Expected Discounted Utility, obtained by imposing only the behavioral postulates of Discounted Utility and Expected Utility.