Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stepwise artificial evolution of a plant disease resistance gene

Significance Plant nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NB-LRR) proteins are responsible for detecting potential pathogens and triggering a defense response. However, disease resistance can also involve a cost. Here we show that the trailing necrosis cost associated with a broad-recognition version of the NB-LRR protein, Rx, can be overcome by selecting for mutations that increase the sensitivity of the NB-LRR protein. Using homology modeling, we predict that these mutations are colocalized to the ATP/ADP nucleotide-binding pocket, which is thought to control the switch between “active” and “inactive” states. These results suggest that a stepwise approach to coordinating recognition and response could be used to design improved NB-LRRs for use in agriculture. Genes encoding plant nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NB-LRR) proteins confer dominant resistance to diverse pathogens. The wild-type potato NB-LRR protein Rx confers resistance against a single strain of potato virus X (PVX), whereas LRR mutants protect against both a second PVX strain and the distantly related poplar mosaic virus (PopMV). In one of the Rx mutants there was a cost to the broad-spectrum resistance because the response to PopMV was transformed from a mild disease on plants carrying wild-type Rx to a trailing necrosis that killed the plant. To explore the use of secondary mutagenesis to eliminate this cost of broad-spectrum resistance, we performed random mutagenesis of the N-terminal domains of this broad-recognition version of Rx and isolated four mutants with a stronger response against the PopMV coat protein due to enhanced activation sensitivity. These mutations are located close to the nucleotide-binding pocket, a highly conserved structure that likely controls the “switch” between active and inactive NB-LRR conformations. Stable transgenic plants expressing one of these versions of Rx are resistant to the strains of PVX and the PopMV that previously caused trailing necrosis. We conclude from this work that artificial evolution of NB-LRR disease resistance genes in crops can be enhanced by modification of both activation and recognition phases, to both accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative aspects of disease resistance.
Emotion and social information processing.

The goal of this chapter is to understand emotion as a fundamental aspect of a more general information-processing system. Many accounts of information-processing structures, mechanisms, and functions have depicted the human organism as a cold, calculating chunk of hardware; indeed, the common analogy has been to a computer (Dodge, 1986; Simon, 1967). In this chapter, however, I propose that this analogy ignores the varying arousal states of the organism and fails to embed the cognitive activities of the organism in an individual ecology that includes arousal regulation, goal construction, affective experience, and discrete emotional expression. The human information processor is an interactive part of his or her environment, experiencing and transforming stimulus information as well as receptively processing it. My thesis does not posit a separate emotional system that is distinct from the information-processing system (such as Zajonc, 1980, argued). Likewise, I do not believe that some information-processing is emotionally laden and other processing is nonemotional. Rather, borrowing from Piaget (1962, 1973) and Cowan (1978, 1982), I propose that all information processing is emotional, in that emotion is the energy level that drives, organizes, amplifies, and attenuates cognitive activity and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity. There is no such act that is nonemotional; rather, emotion is a descriptor of experience and processing activity (such as “anxious” vigilance or “detached” problem solving). Even though emotion cannot be divorced from the information-processing system, we commonly refer to aspects of emotion as separate from other aspects of information-processing, such as the feelings we experience in response to the perception of events (e.g., feeling afraid of the dark) and the effects of emotion on attention (e.g., being distracted by anxiety related to an upcoming exam).
Burnout in competitive junior tennis players: II. Qualitative analysis

This article reports findings from the second phase of a larger research project designed to examine burnout in competitive junior tennis players. This phase of the project was qualitative in nature and involved two components. First, interviews were conducted with 10 individuals who were identified as being most burned out in the quantitative phase (Phase 1) of the project. Content analyses of the 10 respondents’ interviews identified mental and physical characteristics of burnout, as well as reasons for burning out. Recommendations for preventing burnout in players, parents, and coaches also were gleaned. Second, the 10 individual cases were examined in light of the major tenants of the three existing models of athlete burnout. Results from the examination of the burnout models suggested that burnout is best thought of in terms of Smith’s (1986) chronic stress model with physical and social psychological strains falling under it.
Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the African Iron Age

The Iron Age in eastern and southern Africa extends over the last 2000 years, and, as a cultural term, designates groups of people who were metal­ using agriculturalists. Our understanding of the nature of Iron Age societies has broadened in the last decade through an upsurge in research and improved methods of ordering ceramic and settlement data. I employ the results of these methods in a review of three long-standing problems: the Early Iron Age and the spread of Bantu speakers; the postulated transition from an Early to a Late Iron Age; and the origins of the Zimbabwe Culture.
Making Automatic Speech Recognition More Robust to Fast Speech

Psychoacoustic studies show that human listeners are sensitive to speaking rate variations [32]. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are even more affected by the changes in rate, as double to quadruple word recognition error rates of average speakers have been observed for fast speakers on many ASR systems [24]. In this work, we have studied the causes of higher error and concluded that both the acoustic-phonetic and the phonological differences are sources of higher word error rates. We have also studied various measures for quantifying rate of speech (ROS), and used simple methods for estimating the speaking rate of a novel utterance using ASR technology. We have implemented mechanisms that make our ASR system more robust to fast speech. Using our ROS estimator to identify fast sentences in the test set, our rate-dependent system has 24.5% fewer errors on the fastest sentences and 6.2% fewer errors on all sentences of the WSJ93 evaluation set relative to the baseline HMM/MLP system. These results were achieved using some gross approximations: adjustment for one rate over an entire utterance, hand-tweaked rather than optimal transition parameters, and quantization of rate effects to two levels (fast and not fast).
Homicide convictions in different age-groups: a national clinical survey

The purpose of this study was to examine the social, clinical and forensic characteristics of all convicted homicide perpetrators by different age-groups over an 8-year period (1997–2004) in England and Wales. Perpetrators aged under 25 were more likely to use hitting or kicking compared to other offenders, and their victims were more often young, male and a stranger. In contrast, perpetrators aged 65 and over were most likely to use strangulation/suffocation and the victim was more often a female and a family member or spouse. In younger perpetrators, drug and alcohol misuse and previous violence were more common. Older perpetrators had high rates of affective disorder and were more likely to be mentally ill at the time of the offence. Targeting substance and alcohol misuse and street violence may reduce homicide risk in younger people. Preventing homicide among the elderly might be best achieved through more specialised GP training to improve recognition and treatment of depression.
Mechanism by Which Serotonin, Norepinephrine and Reserpine Cause Central Vasomotor Inhibition

Several vasoconstrictor drugs and reserpine administered into a cerebral lateral ventricle inhibited the reflex pressor response to occlusion of the common carotid arteries in both anesthetized and unanesthetized dogs. This effect was opposed by central administration of the vasodilator drugs, nitroprusside and histamine. Serotonin, norepinephrine and their precursors, 5-hydroxytryptophan and 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine, and reserpine caused lowering of arterial pressure and slowing of heart rate as well as inhibition of the carotid occlusion response; angiotensin and vasopressin did not. The central inhibitory effect of norepinephrine was opposed by phentolamine; that of 5-hydroxytryptophan was not affected by lysergic acid diethylamide or its brom derivative. Cooling of cerebrospinal fluid, which presumably caused local vasoconstriction, also caused inhibition of the carotid occlusion response, hypotension and bradycardia, and these effects were counteracted by central injection of vasodilator drugs. Warming of cerebrospinal fluid, presumably associated with local vasodilation, opposed the central inhibitory effect of vasoconstrictor drugs and of reserpine. In view of the consistently opposite effects of vasoconstrictor and vasodilator drugs and procedures on central vasomotor sympathetic activity, it is tentatively concluded that these effects depend on change in local blood flow. The acute cardiovascular effects of reserpine of central origin are probably due to local decrease of tissue perfusion caused by serotonin, norepinephrine or other vasoconstrictor agent released from a bound to an active form.
Reasoning about Strategies: on the Satisfiability Problem

Strategy Logic (SL, for short) has been introduced by Mogavero, Murano, and Vardi as a useful formalism for reasoning explicitly about strategies, as first-order objects, in multi-agent concurrent games. This logic turns out to be very powerful, subsuming all major previously studied modal logics for strategic reasoning, including ATL, ATL*, and the like. Unfortunately, due to its high expressiveness, SL has a non-elementarily decidable model-checking problem and the satisfiability question is undecidable, specifically Sigma_1^1. In order to obtain a decidable sublogic, we introduce and study here One-Goal Strategy Logic (SL[1G], for short). This is a syntactic fragment of SL, strictly subsuming ATL*, which encompasses formulas in prenex normal form having a single temporal goal at a time, for every strategy quantification of agents. We prove that, unlike SL, SL[1G] has the bounded tree-model property and its satisfiability problem is decidable in 2ExpTime, thus not harder than the one for ATL*.
Perceptions of entrepreneurial personality traits: evidence from Greece

The twin objective of this study was to expose perceived entrepreneurial personality traits and examine their interrelationships with the reported own personality traits of respondents. The study drew evidence from a population of business students in Greece and was undertaken under the lights of respondents' gender and culture. A quantitative survey methodology was adopted for the empirical part while the findings' implications were derived through theoretic triangulation. Support is offered to the notion of similarities across cultures in entrepreneurial personality characteristics on the grounds of common entrepreneurial challenges. Personality elements such as risk-taking propensity and ambiguity tolerance are not present in perceptions of entrepreneurial personality. Findings confirm that entrepreneurial personality perceptions of males and females do not differ but the idea of business in general and entrepreneurship in particular being a 'man's world' is strongly challenged. Students of both sexes appeared to have low entrepreneurial propensity and not identify themselves with perceived entrepreneurial personality. Entrepreneurial propensity was found to be culturally influenced.
Determinants of Catheter Loss following Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis Peritonitis

Background Few patients are able to resume peritoneal dialysis (PD) therapy after an episode of peritonitis that requires catheter removal. PD catheter loss is therefore regarded as an important index of patient morbidity. The aim of the present study was to evaluate factors influencing catheter loss in patients suffering from continuous ambulatory PD (CAPD) peritonitis. Patients and Methods We retrospectively reviewed 579 episodes of CAPD peritonitis from 1999 to 2006 in a tertiary-care referral hospital. Demographic, biochemical, and microbiological characteristics were recorded. Episodes resulting in PD catheter removal (n = 68; 12%) were compared by both univariate and multivariate analyses with those in which PD catheters were preserved. Results The incidence of PD catheter loss increased as the number of organisms cultured increased (p = 0.001). Also, PD catheter removal was more likely to occur after peritonitis episodes with low serum albumin level (p = 0.004), those with long duration of PD effluent leukocyte count remaining above 100/μL (p < 0.001), those with concomitant tunnel infection (p < 0.001), those with concomitant exit-site infection (p = 0.005), and those with presence of catastrophic intra-abdominal visceral events (p < 0.001). Duration on PD preceding the peritonitis episode was of borderline significance (p = 0.080). On the contrary, initial PD effluent leukocyte count and serum level of C-reactive protein were not predictive of PD catheter loss. Micro-organisms of the Enterobacteriaceae family were the major pathogens responsible for PD catheter loss following polymicrobial peritonitis. Furthermore, we found that there was no association between polymicrobial peritonitis and the catastrophic intra-abdominal visceral event, although both resulted in a greater incidence of PD catheter loss. Among the single-organism group in our population, the microbiological determinants of PD catheter loss included fungi (p < 0.001), anaerobes (p = 0.018), and Pseudomonas sp (borderline significance: p = 0.095). Conclusion PD catheter loss as a consequence of peritonitis is related primarily to hypoalbuminemia, longer duration of PD effluent leukocyte count remaining above 100/μL, the etiologic source of the infection, and the organism causing the infection. Peritonitis associated with concomitant tunnel or exit-site infections and abdominal catastrophes were more likely to proceed to PD catheter loss. The microbiological determinants of PD catheter loss in the present study included polymicrobial infections caused by Enterobacteriaceae as well as monomicrobial pseudomonal, anaerobic, and fungal infections.
Online Collaborative Prediction of Regional Vote Results

We consider online predictions of vote results, where regions across a country vote on an issue under discussion. Such online predictions before and during the day of the vote are useful to media agencies, polling institutes, and political parties, e.g., to identify regions that are crucial in determining the national outcome of a vote. We analyze a unique dataset from Switzerland. The dataset contains 281 votes from 2352 regions over a period of 34 years. We make several contributions towards improving online predictions. First, we show that these votes exhibit a bi-clustering of the vote results, i.e., regions that are spatially close tend to vote similarly, and issues that discuss similar topics show similar global voting patterns. Second, we develop models that can exploit this bi-clustering, as well as the features associated with the votes and regions. Third, we show that, when combining vote results and features together, Bayesian methods are essential to obtaining good performance. Our results show that Bayesian methods give better estimates of the hyperparameters than non-Bayesian methods such as cross-validation. The resulting models generalize well to many different tasks, produce robust predictions, and are easily interpretable.
Monoclonal antibodies against Haemophilus lipopolysaccharides: clone DP8 specific for Haemophilus ducreyi and clone DH24 binding to lacto-N-neotetraose

Mouse monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) DP8 [immunoglobulin G1(kappa)] and DH24 [immunoglobulin M(kappa)], which are specific for Haemophilus ducreyi lipopolysaccharide (LPS), were generated by fusing mouse myeloma NS0 cells with spleen cells of BALB/c mice immunized with a total membrane preparation of H. ducreyi. MAb DP8 reacted in whole-cell enzyme immunoassay (EIA) and colony dot immunoblotting with all 50 strains of H. ducreyi but not with any other bacteria tested, which suggests an exposed and species-specific epitope on the H. ducreyi cell surface. This conclusion was supported by the finding that DP8 bound to all six H. ducreyi LPSs tested but not to any of the Haemophilus influenzae or enterobacterial LPSs or synthetic glycoconjugates. The MAb DH24 bound to 43 of 50 strains of H. ducreyi and to few strains of H. influenzae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Neisseria meningitidis, as evaluated by whole-cell EIA and colony dot immunoblotting. The MAb DH24 reacted with five of the six H. ducreyi LPSs tested and with the lacto-N-neotetraose (Gal beta 1-->4GlcNAc beta 1-->3Gal beta 1-->4Glc) series of synthetic glycoconjugates, as determined by EIA. By using polysaccharides obtained after both mild acidic hydrolysis and strong alkali treatment and dephosphorylated samples as inhibitors of the MAbs binding to H. ducreyi LPS antigens, it could be shown that phosphate groups were essential for the binding of DP8 to LPS but that they did not affect antigenic recognition by DH24. None of the MAbs bound to isolated lipid A, but aggregation caused by the fatty acids of lipid A was essential for epitope recognition.
Catamenial pneumothorax: a rare entity? Report of 5 cases and review of the literature.

OBJECTIVE Spontaneous recurrent pneumothorax during menstruation is reported as catamenial pneumothorax. It is encountered in 3-6% of spontaneous pneumothorax cases among menstruating women. The percentage among women referred for surgery is significantly higher (25-30%). Although it usually involves the right-side (85-95%) it can be left-sided or bilateral. It is associated with diaphragmatic perforations and/or thoracic endometriosis. There is pelvic endometriosis in up to 30-51% of cases. The lesions that are not always found may present as small or larger holes at the central tendon of the diaphragm, as red, blueberry, brown spots or larger nodules at the diaphragm, the visceral or parietal pleura. Lesion histology may reveal endometriosis. We present 5 cases of catamenial pneumothorax treated surgically during the last 6 years. PATIENTS AND METHODS Five women, with a mean age of 34+/-9.9 years (median 38, range, 19-45 years) presented with right-sided recurrent catamenial pneumothorax. In 3 patients diaphragmatic perforation(s) were found; perforation suturing (n=1), and diaphragmatic plication reinforced with bovine pericardial patch (n=1) were performed. All patients underwent atypical resection of upper and/or middle lobe segments of lung parenchyma that appeared abnormal (haemorrhagic/emphysematous or blebs). Four patients underwent pleurodesis and 1 patient underwent pleurectomy. Four interventions were performed through video assisted thoracoscopic surgery, while diaphragmatic plication was performed through a video assisted mini-thoracotomy. Histology did not reveal endometriosis tissue. RESULTS The postoperative course was uneventful. The patients were extubated in theatre and were discharged home at a mean of 7+/-4 days (median 6 days, range, 4-14 days). Two of them received hormonal therapy [Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH) analogue] postoperatively. At a follow-up of 14.16 patient-years (mean 2.83+/-1.08 years, range, 1.33-3.83 years) there was recurrence, 6.5 months postoperatively, in one patient that had not undergone closure of a tiny diaphragmatic hole and had not received hormonal treatment postoperatively. She was treated medically (amenorrhea for 6 months with GnRH analogue) and had no further recurrences (in 3.3 years). CONCLUSIONS Surgery is the treatment of choice of catamenial pneumothorax. It should aim to complete management of all lesions. The most common complication is recurrence. Early diagnosis and multidisciplinary treatment including hormonal therapy may be beneficial in high risk patients.
Galactic star-formation rates gauged by stellar end-products

Young galactic X-ray point sources (XPs) closely trace the ongoing star formation in galaxies. From measured XP number counts we extract the collective 2-10 keV luminosity of young XPs, L_yXP, which we use to gauge the current star-formation rate (SFR) in galaxies. We find that, for a sample of local star-forming galaxies (i.e., normal spirals and mild starbursts), L_yXP correlates linearly with the SFR over three decades in luminosity. A separate, high-SFR sample of starburst ULIRGs can be used to check the calibration of the relation. Using their (presumably SF-related) total 2-10 keV luminosities we find that these sources satisfy the SFR-L_yXP relation, as defined by the weaker sample, and extend it to span about 5 decades in luminosity. The SFR-L_yXP relation is likely to hold also for distant Hubble Deep Field North galaxies, especially so if these high-SFR objects are similar to the (more nearby) ULIRGs. It is argued that the SFR-L_yXP relation provides the most adequate X-ray estimator of instantaneous SFR by the phenomena characterizing massive stars from their birth (FIR emission from placental dust clouds) through their death as compact remnants (emitting X-rays by accreting from a close donor). For local, low/intermediate-SFR galaxies, the simultaneous existence of a correlation of the instantaneous SFR with the total 2-10 keV luminosity, which traces the SFR integrated over (approximately) the last Gyr, suggests that during such epoch the SF in these galaxies has been proceeding at a relatively constant rate.
Unobtrusive In-Home Monitoring of Cognitive and Physical Health: Reactions and Perceptions of Older Adults

Although the potential benefits of unobtrusive in-home sensing technologies for maintaining health and independence of older adults have been highlighted in recent research, little is known about their views toward such technology. The aims of this project were to identify monitoring needs and expectations of community-residing elderly and their family members. Focus groups were presented with examples of in-home monitoring devices and data output; participants were asked to consider whether the data showed information that was meaningful to them, and how and to whom they would like to have such data disseminated. Content analysis of transcripts revealed four dominant themes: maintaining independence, detecting cognitive decline, sharing of information, and the trade-off between privacy and usefulness of monitoring. The acceptance by elderly of unobtrusive in-home monitoring was closely tied to perceived utility of data generated by such systems. Privacy concerns appeared to be less of an issue than anticipated in this sample.