Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification of an Active Reverse Transcriptase Enzyme Encoded by a Human Endogenous HERV-K Retrovirus

ABSTRACT Of the numerous endogenous retroviral elements that are present in the human genome, the abundant HERV-K family is distinct because several members are transcriptionally active and coding for biologically active proteins. A detailed phylogeny of the HERV-K family based on the partial sequence of the reverse transcriptase (RT) gene revealed a high incidence of an intact RT open reading frame within the HML-2 subgroup of HERV-K elements. In this study, we report the cloning of six full-length HML-2 RT genes, of which five contain an uninterrupted open reading frame. The RT enzymes were expressed as glutathione S-transferase fusion proteins inEscherichia coli, and several HERV-K RT enzymes demonstrated polymerase as well as RNase H activity. Several biochemical properties of the RT polymerase were analyzed, including the template requirements and optimal reaction conditions (temperature, type of divalent cation). Inspection of the nucleotide sequence of the HERV-K RT genes demonstrated a mosaic structure, suggesting that a high level of genetic recombination has occurred in this virus family, which is a hallmark of replication by means of reverse transcription. The selective pressure to maintain the RT coding potential is illustrated by the sequence of a particular HERV-K isolate that contains three 1-nucleotide deletions within a small RT segment, thus maintaining the open reading frame. These combined results may suggest that these endogenous RT enzymes still have a biological function. It is possible that the RT activity was involved in the spread of this major class of retroelements by retrotransposition, and in fact it cannot be excluded that this retrovirus group is still mobile. The endogenous RT activity may also have been involved in the shaping of the human genome, e.g., by formation of pseudogenes.
The Architecture of Complexity From network structure to human dynamics

We are surrounded by complex systems, from cells, made of thousands of different molecules that seamlessly work together, to society, a collection of billions of interacting individuals that displays signatures of order and self-organization. Understanding and quantifying this complexity is a grand challenge for science in general. Kinetic theory set the stage at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that the measurable properties of gases, from pressure to temperature, can be reduced to the random motion of atoms and molecules. In the 1960s and 70s, researchers developed systematic approaches to quantifying the transition from disorder to order in material systems, such as magnets and liquids. Chaos theory, with its message that complex and unpredictable behavior can emerge from the nonlinear interactions of a few components, dominated the quest to understand complex behavior in the 1980s. The 1990s were the decade of fractals, quantifying the geometry of patterns emerging in self-organized systems, from leaves to snowflakes.
Using Deep Semantic Segmentation Model to Divide the Human Body Images

Deep semantic networks have achieved good results in object segmentation. Improvements have made to the deep network model to achieve human segmentation on a single CPU. In specific scenarios, the human body images can divided into multiple targets. Consider the spatial and temporal connectivity of different parts of the human body, and establish contextual connections using perspective clues. In addition to pixel level annotations, semantic regions should labeled with shapes or structures. Developed an advanced region detection method that integrates data with other pixel level segmentation data. Training and evaluation require a large number of data samples. We have built a human body dataset ourselves. This dataset comes from the internet and image collections. Label each human body based on 12 target categories. In order to quantitatively evaluate the segmentation effect, we conducted testing and statistics on all images in the dataset. Experiments have shown that deep semantic segmentation achieve good result in object segmentation.
Estimating MIMO system performance using the correlation matrix approach

The channel capacity of a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system depends substantially on correlation between individual receive branches. We investigate the MIMO capacity using the correlation matrix approach and the Salz-Winters (1994) spatial correlation model. It is shown that for a linear array, correlation has no impact on the MIMO channel capacity provided that the two-element array beamwidth is smaller than the angle spread of the incoming signals. Simple but accurate approximations for the correlation coefficient and the corresponding channel capacity are derived for different angular spreads.
Union Effects on Health Insurance Provision and Coverage in the United States

During the past two decades, union density has declined in the United States and employer provision of health benefits has changed substantially in extent and form. Using individual survey data spanning the years 1983–97 combined with employer survey data for 1993, the authors update and extend previous analyses of private-sector union effects on employer-provided health benefits. They find that the union effect on health insurance coverage rates has fallen somewhat but remains large, due to an increase over time in the union effect on employee “take-up” of offered insurance, and that declining unionization explains 20–35% of the decline in employee health coverage. The increasing union take-up effect is linked to union effects on employees' direct costs for health insurance and the availability of retiree coverage.
The Validity and Reliability Study of the Turkish Version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire

The purpose of this study is to adapt The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire to Turkish. After examining and confirming equivalency between English and Turkish versions, the scale was administered to 852 students from two universities. In order to examine the validity and reliability properties of the questionnaire, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, Cronbach Alpha correlation coefficients, corrected item-total correlations and t-tests between items’ means of upper 27%-lover 27% points were used. Results of these analyses show that the first subscale, Motivation, has six factors, and the second subscale, Learning Strategies, has nine factors. The Cronbach alpha coefficients varied between 0.86 and 0.41. Corrected item total correlations ranged 0.66 to 0.19. According to t-test results, differences between each item’s means of upper 27 % and lower 27 % points are significant.
Beyond circulating microRNA biomarkers: Urinary microRNAs in ovarian and breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women worldwide, and ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological malignancy. Women carrying a BRCA1/2 mutation have a very high lifetime risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. The only effective risk-reducing strategy in BRCA-mutated women is a prophylactic surgery with bilateral mastectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. However, many women are reluctant to undergo these prophylactic surgeries due to a consequent mutilated body perception, unfulfilled family planning, and precocious menopause. In these patients, an effective screening strategy is available only for breast cancer, but it only consists in close radiological exams with a significant burden for the health system and a significant distress to the patients. No biomarkers have been shown to effectively detect breast and ovarian cancer at an early stage. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are key regulatory molecules operating in a post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. Aberrant expression of miRNAs has been documented in several pathological conditions, including solid tumors, suggesting their involvement in tumorigenesis. miRNAs can be detected in blood and urine and could be used as biomarkers in solid tumors. Encouraging results are emerging in gynecological malignancy as well, and suggest a different pattern of expression of miRNAs in biological fluids of breast and ovarian cancer patients as compared to healthy control. Aim of this study is to highlight the role of the urinary miRNAs which are specifically associated with cancer and to investigate their role in early diagnosis and in determining the prognosis in breast and ovarian cancer.
Delusions and the Role of Beliefs in Perceptual Inference

Delusions are unfounded yet tenacious beliefs and a symptom of psychotic disorder. Varying degrees of delusional ideation are also found in the healthy population. Here, we empirically validated a neurocognitive model that explains both the formation and the persistence of delusional beliefs in terms of altered perceptual inference. In a combined behavioral and functional neuroimaging study in healthy participants, we used ambiguous visual stimulation to probe the relationship between delusion-proneness and the effect of learned predictions on perception. Delusional ideation was associated with less perceptual stability, but a stronger belief-induced bias on perception, paralleled by enhanced functional connectivity between frontal areas that encoded beliefs and sensory areas that encoded perception. These findings suggest that weakened lower-level predictions that result in perceptual instability are implicated in the emergence of delusional beliefs. In contrast, stronger higher-level predictions that sculpt perception into conformity with beliefs might contribute to the tenacious persistence of delusional beliefs.
TinyFL: A Lightweight Federated Learning Method with Efficient Memory-and-Communication

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning framework that enables collaborative model training without raw data sharing. However, due to the shortage of memory resources at edge devices and the communication bandwidths at the wireless network, FL encounters significant challenges in edge model deployments. To address the above issues, we introduce a lightweight FL method that retains efficient computation and communication abilities under a small amount of memory and bandwidth resources, namely, Tiny Federated Learning (TinyFL). Particularly, we propose a novel sparse update mechanism by back-propagating a segment of the last $l$ layers to prominently decrease the memory usage of edge models, while ensuring the performance of the model. Based on the proposed sparse update mechanism, we investigate a parameter splitting method to save communication resources by uploading the updated model parameters for aggregation under a redesigned algorithm. Based on the proposed TinyFL, we analyze the convergence performance theoretically and unveil that it is highly dependent on the sparse updating ratio and the packet error rate from the wireless transmission. Numerical results present that TinyFL achieves similar accuracy and convergence performance under less than half memory occupation of the traditional FL approaches. Moreover, TinyFL can also reduce the amount of communication resources apparently.
Advancing sexuality education in developing countries: evidence and implications.

Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence in support of comprehensive sexuality education implementing programs that actually provide young people the sexuality education they need is easier said than done. Each country and region is different and there is wide variation in policies government structures traditions resources and limitations. But even as implementers strive to be context-specific certain themes and considerations emerge. Meanwhile concerted actions must be taken to build and sustain political will for these programs. In many communities worldwide government officials school principals teachers and parents may not all be convinced of the need for sexuality education or else may be reluctant to provide it because they do not want to be perceived as promoting sexual activity. Vocal groups that oppose sexuality education may be in the minority but they can be extremely effective at pressuring policymakers and school districts to not allow sexuality education. One starting point for building and sustaining more widespread support for sexuality education is to demonstrate what the evidence has to say about the benefits of these programs. Scientific evidence can keep public attention focused on the rights and needs of young people help frame the public policy debate and help mobilize public support -- all of which can make a difference in policies programs and practice. (Excerpt)
Firewood management practice by hoteliers and non-hoteliers in Langtang valley, Nepal Himalayas

Langtang Region is the third largest trekking destination in Nepal. The annual tourist flow was about 8000 by 2000. However, after 2000, the number of tourists were increased to about 15000 annually. Out of it, one third tourists visit to the Langtang Valley. With increasing number of tourists, the number of hotels and lodges are also rapidly increased there. Firewood has been the major source of energy for both hoteliers and non-hoteliers for a long time and its demand has been abruptly increased with increasing number of hotels and lodges. Both hoteliers and non-hoteliers collect firewood from nearby forest and also transport from the valley bottom to Langtang village and Kyanjing. However, there are major differences in collection places, and collection strategy especially in terms of distance, preference of tree species, purpose, and relation to nature. The Geographical Journal of Nepal Vol. 10: 55-72, 2017
Renal Cell Carcinoma Detected by Screening Shows Better Patient Survival Than That Detected Following Symptoms in Dialysis Patients

Abstract: There is an apparent advantage to early or incidental diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma in the general population. We investigated whether the prognosis of dialysis patients with renal cell carcinoma is better if renal cell carcinoma is detected by screening of patients without symptoms rather than by examination after the appearance of the symptoms. Two groups in which renal cell carcinomas were detected by screening (N = 721) and by symptoms (n = 76) were compared. The model tested consisted of patient age and duration of dialysis in addition to the detection by screening or symptoms. Cox proportional hazard model was used to compare survival rates between the groups. The hazard ratio of death from all causes in patients with renal cell carcinoma detection by screening was 0.653 and the risk of death was reduced by 35%, compared with that in the group with detection due to symptoms. Moreover, the 50% survival rate in the group detected by symptoms was 80 months and the ratio of those detected by screening was 119 months. Therefore, screening provided a survival benefit of 39 months (3.3 years) in death from all causes after adjustment for age and duration of dialysis. The survival rate was best in young patients with a short duration of dialysis and renal cell carcinoma detected by screening. In dialysis patients with renal cell carcinoma, the survival rate in the group detected by screening was better than that in the group detected by symptoms. Especially, there was a large effect of screening for renal cell carcinoma in the young dialysis patients.
Nerve Growth Factor Delivery by Gene Transfer Induces Differential Outgrowth of Sensory, Motor, and Noradrenergic Neurites after Adult Spinal Cord Injury

Several neurotrophic factors have been identified that influence neuronal populations during central nervous system development, maturation, and senescence. To examine the responsiveness of the intact and the lesioned adult mammalian spinal cord to neurotrophic factors, primary rat fibroblasts were genetically modified to produce and secrete human nerve growth factor (NGF). These NGF-producing cells were then grafted to nonlesioned or lesioned adult rat spinal cords for periods of up to 1 year in vivo. Robust outgrowth of sensory and noradrenergic neurites was elicited by grafts in the previously nonlesioned spinal cord. Equally robust growth of sensory and noradrenergic neurites was observed in the lesioned spinal cord; in addition, partial sprouting of local motor neurites was elicited in the lesioned spinal cord. Thus, multiple neuritic populations of the adult spinal cord respond to neurotrophic factors by extending neurites, and this responsiveness is maintained and extended after major injury. Nerve growth factor delivered by somatic gene transfer may be a useful means of promoting axon regrowth in the injured spinal cord.
Mobile search pattern evolution: the trend and the impact of voice queries

In this paper we study the characteristics of search queries submitted from mobile devices using Yahoo! Search for Mobile during a 2 months period in early of 2010, and compare the results with a similar study conducted in late 2007. The major findings include 1) mobile search queries have become much more diverse, and 2) user interest and information needs have been substantially changed at least in some areas of search topics, including adult and local intent queries. In addition we investigate the impact of voice query search interface offered by Yahoo! 's mobile search service. We examine how unstructured spoken queries differ from conventional search queries.
Hierarchical Dynamic Model for Human Daily Activity Recognition

This work deals with the task of human daily activity recognition using miniature inertial sensors. The proposed method is based on the development of a hierarchical dynamic model, incorporating both inter-activity and intra-activity dynamics, thereby exploiting the inherently dynamic nature of the problem to aid the classification task. The method uses raw acceleration and angular velocity signals, directly recorded by inertial sensors, bypassing commonly used feature extraction and selection techniques and, thus, keeping all information regarding the dynamics of the signals. Classification results show a competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Enhancing Customer Satisfaction in Hotel Industry Through Chatbot as E-Services Agent and Communication Credibility

The purpose of this study is to investigate how utilizing e-service agent chatbots affects customer happiness and the veracity of communication in the hotel business. Participants were chosen using the non-probability sampling method, and data were gathered by surveying chatbot users who made hotel reservations. To examine the relationship between variables, the Structural Equation Modelling Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) analysis method is utilized. The findings demonstrated that the utilization of interaction, entertainment, and problem-solving bye-service agent chatbots has a favorable impact on customer satisfaction and communication credibility. The study discovered that e-service agent chatbots had no impact on communication credibility and customer satisfaction, notwithstanding trendiness characteristics. These results indicate that e-service agent chatbots can improve interaction, entertainment, and problem-solving abilities. However, it is important for the hotel industry to consider the trendiness element carefully in chatbot development to achieve optimal results.
Alkalinity to calcium flux ratios for corals and coral reef communities: variances between isolated and community conditions

Calcification in reef corals and coral reefs is widely measured using the alkalinity depletion method which is based on the fact that two protons are produced for every mole of CaCO3 precipitated. This assumption was tested by measuring the total alkalinity (TA) flux and Ca2+ flux of isolated components (corals, alga, sediment and plankton) in reference to that of a mixed-community. Experiments were conducted in a flume under natural conditions of sunlight, nutrients, plankton and organic matter. A realistic hydrodynamic regime was provided. Groups of corals were run separately and in conjunction with the other reef components in a mixed-community. The TA flux to Ca2+ flux ratio (ΔTA: ΔCa2+) was consistently higher in the coral-only run (2.06 ± 0.19) than in the mixed-community run (1.60 ± 0.14, p-value = 0.011). The pH was higher and more stable in the mixed-community run (7.94 ± 0.03 vs. 7.52 ± 0.07, p-value = 3 × 10−5). Aragonite saturation state (Ωarag) was also higher in the mixed-community run (2.51 ± 0.2 vs. 1.12 ± 0.14, p-value = 2 × 10−6). The sediment-only run revealed that sediment is the source of TA that can account for the lower ΔTA: ΔCa2+ ratio in the mixed-community run. The macroalgae-only run showed that algae were responsible for the increased pH in the mixed-community run. Corals growing in a mixed-community will experience an environment that is more favorable to calcification (higher daytime pH due to algae photosynthesis, additional TA and inorganic carbon from sediments, higher Ωarag). A paradox is that the alkalinity depletion method will yield a lower net calcification for a mixed-community versus a coral-only community due to TA recycling, even though the corals may be calcifying at a higher rate due to a more optimal environment.
Low-power CMOS receivers for short reach optical communication

Emerging applications for short-reach optical communication require low-power receiver circuits in nanoscale CMOS technologies. An analysis of optical receivers with broadband input transimpedance reveals that their power consumption increases rapidly as bit-rate increases. This has motivated work on bandwidth-limited optical receiver front-ends. For example, receivers employing decision feedback equalization (DFE) and correlated-double sampling (CDS) are analyzed, showing that they significantly relax the bandwidth requirements of the analog front-ends, permitting their low-power implementation in CMOS. Finally the design of an optical receiver utilizing an integrate-and-dump (ID) front-end is described. The receiver is implemented in 28nm CMOS and achieves −8.3dBm sensitivity at 20Gbps consuming 0.7pJ/b.
Tracing the Source of Campylobacteriosis

Campylobacter jejuni is the leading cause of bacterial gastro-enteritis in the developed world. It is thought to infect 2–3 million people a year in the US alone, at a cost to the economy in excess of US $4 billion. C. jejuni is a widespread zoonotic pathogen that is carried by animals farmed for meat and poultry. A connection with contaminated food is recognized, but C. jejuni is also commonly found in wild animals and water sources. Phylogenetic studies have suggested that genotypes pathogenic to humans bear greatest resemblance to non-livestock isolates. Moreover, seasonal variation in campylobacteriosis bears the hallmarks of water-borne disease, and certain outbreaks have been attributed to contamination of drinking water. As a result, the relative importance of these reservoirs to human disease is controversial. We use multilocus sequence typing to genotype 1,231 cases of C. jejuni isolated from patients in Lancashire, England. By modeling the DNA sequence evolution and zoonotic transmission of C. jejuni between host species and the environment, we assign human cases probabilistically to source populations. Our novel population genetics approach reveals that the vast majority (97%) of sporadic disease can be attributed to animals farmed for meat and poultry. Chicken and cattle are the principal sources of C. jejuni pathogenic to humans, whereas wild animal and environmental sources are responsible for just 3% of disease. Our results imply that the primary transmission route is through the food chain, and suggest that incidence could be dramatically reduced by enhanced on-farm biosecurity or preventing food-borne transmission.