Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
St, a Truncated Envelope Protein Derived from the S Protein of Duck Hepatitis B Virus, Acts as a Chaperone for the Folding of the Large Envelope Protein

ABSTRACT Envelope proteins of hepadnaviruses undergo a unique folding mechanism which results in the posttranslational translocation of 50% of the large envelope protein (L) chains across the endoplasmic reticulum. This mechanism is essential for the eventual positioning of the receptor-binding domain on the surface of the virus particle and in duck hepatitis B virus (DHBV) is dependent on the small (S) envelope protein as part of the assembly process. In this study, we report the identification of a third envelope protein, St, derived from the S protein and carrying functions previously attributed to S. Antibody mapping and mutagenesis studies indicated St to be C terminally truncated, spanning the N-terminal transmembrane domain (TM1) plus the adjacent cysteine loop. We have previously shown that the mutation of two conserved polar residues in TM1 of S (SAA) eliminates L translocation and assembly. A plasmid expressing a functional equivalent of St was able to rescue assembly, demonstrating that this assembly defect is due to mutations of the corresponding residues in St and not in S per se. Immunofluorescence analysis showed that St directly affects L protein cellular localization. These results indicate that St acts as a viral chaperone for L folding, remaining associated with the DHBV envelope upon secretion. The presence of St at a molar ratio of half that of L suggests that it is St which regulates L translocation to 50%.
An efficient and accurate method for evaluating time series similarity

A variety of techniques currently exist for measuring the similarity between time series datasets. Of these techniques, the methods whose matching criteria is bounded by a specified ε threshold value, such as the LCSS and the EDR techniques, have been shown to be robust in the presence of noise, time shifts, and data scaling. Our work proposes a new algorithm, called the Fast Time Series Evaluation (FTSE) method, which can be used to evaluate such threshold value techniques, including LCSS and EDR. Using FTSE, we show that these techniques can be evaluated faster than using either traditional dynamic programming or even warp-restricting methods such as the Sakoe-Chiba band and the Itakura Parallelogram. We also show that FTSE can be used in a framework that can evaluate a richer range of ε threshold-based scoring techniques, of which EDR and LCSS are just two examples. This framework, called Swale, extends the ε threshold-based scoring techniques to include arbitrary match rewards and gap penalties. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that Swale can obtain greater accuracy than existing methods.
The role of race in court-ordered pretrial psychiatric evaluations

Abstract The current study examines whether racial differences exist for defendants referred by criminal courts for pretrial psychiatric evaluations across demographic, clinical, and criminal history variables. Compared to Caucasian defendants, African Americans were younger, less educated, diagnosed more frequently with schizophrenia, but less with mood disorders, more likely to have prior felony convictions, and more likely to be in jail at the time of the evaluation. In addition, when controlling for other factors, African American defendants were more likely to be evaluated by forensic examiners as having a mental disease or defect, but racial differences did not exist for opinions regarding the need for inpatient hospitalization, incompetency to stand trial, or responsibility at the time of the crime. Practice recommendations are discussed.
Testing Accommodations and the Measurement of Student Academic Growth

ABSTRACT Using two states’ grades 3 through 8 state assessment databases, this study documents the extent to which students were assigned testing accommodations for ELA or mathematics in only one of two consecutive years. The percentage of students with disabilities who were assigned accommodations in the current year only or in the prior year only in a given grade statewide was not trivial, sometimes exceeding 25%. The relationship between inconsistent assignment to any accommodations and both students’ prior proficiency level and aggregate growth is also documented. Group differences were observed at the state level. No practical differences were observed when covariates for inconsistent assignment were included in school value-added models, but very few schools had a substantial proportion of students with disabilities assigned accommodations inconsistently in a given grade. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Motivated reasoning when assessing the effects of refugee intake

Abstract Do differences in worldview ideology hinder people from objectively interpreting the effect of immigration? In an experiment with Swedish adults (n = 1015), we investigate whether people display motivated reasoning when interpreting numerical information about the effects of refugee intake on crime rate. Our results show clear evidence of motivated reasoning along the lines of worldview ideology (i.e., whether people identify themselves primarily as nationally oriented or globally oriented). In scenarios where refugee intake was associated with higher crime rate, nationally oriented people were 18 percentage points more likely to make the correct assessment compared to globally oriented people. Likewise, in scenarios where refugee intake was associated with lower crime rate, nationally oriented people were 20 percentage points less likely to make the correct assessment compared to globally oriented people. Individuals with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning, suggesting that motivated reasoning more commonly is driven by feelings and emotional cues rather than deliberate analytical processes.
Convergent evolution of sexual shape dimorphism in Diptera

Several patterns of sexual shape dimorphism, such as male body elongation, eye stalks, or extensions of the exoskeleton, have evolved repeatedly in the true flies (Diptera). Although these dimorphisms may have evolved in response to sexual selection on male body shape, conserved genetic factors may have contributed to this convergent evolution, resulting in stronger phenotypic convergence than might be expected from functional requirements alone. I compared phenotypic variation in body shape in two distantly related species exhibiting sexually dimorphic body elongation: Prochyliza xanthostoma (Piophilidae) and Telostylinus angusticollis (Neriidae). Although sexual selection appears to act differently on male body shape in these species, they exhibited strikingly similar patterns of sexual dimorphism. Likewise, patterns of within‐sex shape variation were similar in the two species, particularly in males: relative elongation of the male head capsule, antenna, and legs was associated with reduced head capsule width and wing length, but was nearly independent of variation in thorax length. However, the two species presented contrasting patterns of static allometry: male sexual traits exhibited elevated allometric slopes in T. angusticollis, but not in P. xanthostoma. These results suggest that a shared pattern of covariation among traits may have channeled the evolution of sexually dimorphic body elongation in these species. Nonetheless, static allometries may have been shaped by species‐specific selection pressures or genetic architectures. J. Morphol. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Competitive Routing of Virtual Circuits in ATM Networks

Classical routing and admission control strategies achieve provably good performance by relying on an assumption that the virtual circuits arrival pattern can be described by some a priori known probabilistic model. A new on-line routing framework, based on the notion of competitive analysis, was proposed. This framework is geared toward design of strategies that have provably good performance even in the case where there are no statistical assumptions on the arrival pattern and parameters of the virtual circuits. The on-line strategies motivated by this framework are quite different from the min-hop and reservation-based strategies. This paper surveys the on-line routing framework, the proposed routing and admission control strategies, and discusses some of the implementation issues. >
Rotating circular strings, and infinite non-uniqueness of black rings

We present new self-gravitating solutions in five dimensions that describe circular strings, i.e. rings, electrically coupled to a two-form potential (as e.g. fundamental strings do), or to a dual magnetic one-form. The rings are prevented from collapsing by rotation, and they create a field analogous to a dipole, with no net charge measured at infinity. They can have a regular horizon, and we show that this implies the existence of an infinite number of black rings, labeled by a continuous parameter, with the same mass and angular momentum as neutral black rings and black holes. We also discuss the solution for a rotating loop of fundamental string. We show how more general rings arise from intersections of branes with a regular horizon (even at extremality), closely related to the configurations that yield the four-dimensional black hole with four charges. We reproduce the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a large extremal ring through a microscopic calculation. Finally, we discuss some qualitative ideas for a microscopic understanding of neutral and dipole black rings.
A robust method for the analysis of integrated spectra from globular clusters using Lick indices

ABSTRACT We deﬁne a method for analysis of the integrated spectra of extra-galactic globularclusters that provides more reliable measures of age, metallicity and α-element abun-dance ratio than have so far been achieved. The method involves the simultaneousﬁtting of up to 25 Lick indices in a χ 2 -ﬁtting technique that maximises the use of theavailable data. Here we compare three sets of single stellar population (SSP) modelsof Lick indices to the high signal-to-noise, integrated spectra of 20 Galactic globu-lar clusters. The ages, [Fe/H] and α-element abundance ratios derived from the SSPmodels are compared to the results of resolved stellar population studies from theliterature. We ﬁnd good consistency with the published values, with an agreement ofbetter than 0.1 dex in all three derived parameters. The technique allows identiﬁcationof abundance ratio anomalies, such as the known nitrogen over-abundance in Galac-tic globular clusters, and the presence of anomalous horizontal-branch morphologies.It also minimises the impact on the derived parameters of imperfect calibration tothe Lick system, and reduction errors in general. The method deﬁned in this work istherefore robust with respect to many of the diﬃculties that plague the application ofSSP models in general, and is, consequently, well suited to the study of extra-galacticglobular cluster systems.Key words: stars: abundances – globular clusters: general – methods: analytical
Some Research Problems in Metric Learning and Manifold Learning

In the past few years, metric learning, semi-supervised learning, and manifold learning methods have aroused a great deal of interest in the machine learning community. Many machine learning and pattern recognition algorithms rely on a distance metric. Instead of choosing the metric manually, a promising approach is to learn the metric from data automatically. Besides some early work on metric learning for classification, more and more efforts have been devoted in recent years to learning a distance metric for the semi-supervised learning setting. Semisupervised learning is a learning paradigm between the supervised and unsupervised learning extremes. Algorithms of this class usually solve the classification or clustering problems with the aid of additional background knowledge. While there has been a whole set of interesting ideas on how to learn from data with supervisory information, we focus our study on semisupervised learning in the metric learning context. Manifold learning mainly aims to automatically discover the low-dimensional nonlinear manifold in a high-dimensional data space and then embed the data points into a low-dimensional embedding space. Besides manifold learning for data representation, some researchers have explored the possibility of using manifold structure for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. We have explored some possibilities for the solutions of several research problems in manifold learning under the unsupervised learning setting. To summarize, in this proposal, we will focus on several research problems in metric learning under the semi-supervised learning setting and manifold learning under the unsupervised learning setting. On one hand, we will report some primary work that has been done. On the other hand, we will propose some possible future research directions.
Children’s interactions with water in city centres: a case study from Sheffield, UK

ABSTRACT Children’s experiences of outdoor environments have been studied now for more than 40 years yet no research has specifically focussed on children’s experiences of water play in constructed spaces of city centres. This article discusses the development of an observational mapping tool, called TOWEC, to record the interaction of children with water. It then reports findings and analysis from observations over a year-long period of 3,399 children interacting with water in the award winning public open space of the Peace Gardens in the centre of the City of Sheffield, UK. The findings reveal that children undertake both active and passive activities associated with the constructed water features and that these activities are influenced by gender, age and temperature, but not ethnicity. The water features were not designed for children to play in but the children realise the potential affordance that the water features provide.
Mechanics of Collapse of WTC Towers Clarified by Recent Column Buckling Tests of Korol and Sivakumaran

The previously formulated model of the gravity-driven collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2011 was shown to match all the existing observations, including the video record of the crush-down motion of the top part of tower during the first few seconds, the seismically recorded duration of collapse, the size distribution of particles caused by impact comminution of concrete floor slabs, the loud booms due to near-sonic lateral ejection velocity of air and dust, and precedence of the crush-down collapse mode before the crush-up. Nevertheless, different degrees of ductility, fracturing and end support flexibility of WTC columns could lead to an equally good match of these observations and remained uncertain, due to lack of test data. Recently, Korol and Sivakumaran reported valuable experiments that allow clarifying this uncertainty. They revealed that, under the simplifying assumptions of rigid end supports and unlimited ductility (or no fracturing) of unheated columns, the energy dissipation of the WTC columns would have been at maximum 3.5-times as large as that calculated by the plastic hinge mechanism normally considered for small-deflection buckling. This increase would still allow close match of all the aforementioned observations except for the first two seconds of the video. The proper conclusion from Korol and Sivakumaran’s tests, based on close matching of the video record, is that the fracturing of unheated columns and the flexibility of their end restraints must have significantly reduced the energy dissipation in columns calculated under the assumptions of no fracture and no end restraint flexibility.
Study protocol for a randomised controlled trial of carvedilol versus variceal band ligation in primary prevention of variceal bleeding in liver cirrhosis (CALIBRE trial)

Introduction Liver cirrhosis is the fifth largest cause of adult deaths, and a major complication, variceal bleeding is associated with a 1-year mortality of 40%. There is uncertainty on the first-line therapy for prevention of variceal bleeding owing to a lack of adequately powered trials comparing non-selective beta blockers, in particular carvedilol, with variceal band ligation. Methods and analysis CALIBRE is a multicentre, pragmatic, randomised controlled, open-label trial with an internal pilot. The two interventions are carvedilol 12.5 mg od or variceal band ligation (VBL). Patients with liver cirrhosis and medium to large oesophageal varices that have never bled are eligible for inclusion. The primary outcome is any variceal bleeding within 1 year of randomisation. Secondary endpoints include time to variceal bleed, mortality, transplant-free survival, adverse events, complications of cirrhosis, health-related quality of life, use of healthcare resources, patient preference and use of alternative or crossover therapies. The sample size is 2630 patients over a 4-year recruitment period, across 66 hospitals in the UK. Ethics and dissemination The study has been approved by a National Health Service (NHS) Research Ethics Committee (REC) (reference number 18/NE/0296). The results of this trial will be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal. Participants will be informed via a link to a preview of the publication. A lay summary will also be provided via email or posted to participants prior to publication (ISRCTN reference number: 73887615).
Experimental infection of Phlebotomus perniciosus by bioluminescent Leishmania infantum using murine model and artificial feeder

Leishmaniasis is a vector-borne disease that is transmitted by sandflies and caused by obligate intracellular protozoa of the genus Leishmania. In the present study, we carried out a screening on the experimental infection of Phlebotomus pernioucus by bioluminescent Leishmania infantum using murine model and artificial feeder. We developed a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based method to determine individually the number of Leishmania promastigotes fed by infected flies. Among 1840 new emerged female sand flies, 428 were fed on the infected mice. After their death, they were analysed individually by RT-PCR. Our results demonstrated just a single Leishmania positive female at sixth day post meal. A total of 1070 female sand flies were exposed in contact with artificial feeder containing the human blood with two different quantities of Leishmania parasites: 2.106/mL and 1.107/mL. A blood meal including 1.107/mL LUC-promastigotes was proposed to 270 females and 75 (28%) flies were engorged. Among them, 44 (59%) were positive by RT-PCR analysis, with a relative average of 50551 Leishmania parasites. In case of blood feeding of females with 2.106/mL promastigotes, 57 out of 800 (7%) females succeed to feed from artificial feeder which 22 (39%) were positive with a relative average of 6487 parasites.
Receptive Language Skills among Younger, Adolescent, and Adults with Down Syndrome: The Use of the Growth-Scale-Vocabulary as a Measure

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) demonstrate strength in receptive vocabulary. Most investigators, however, have used either standard scores or age equivalent scores to compare groups with DS. The current study reports on the use of the PPVT. Growth-Scale-Vocabulary scores as a measure of comparison. Three groups of individuals with DS were compared on their PPVT GSV scores as well as on the Oral Written Language Scale (OWLS) and Listening Comprehension Scale. Findings indicated the adolescent group of individuals with DS had higher GSV scores than did either the younger age group or the adult group. Furthermore, the PPVT GSV scores and the OWLS raw scores were not different across the three age groups. Vocabulary comprehension is the strength among individuals with down syndrome.
Transgenerational effects enhance specific immune response in a wild passerine

Vertebrate mothers transfer diverse compounds to developing embryos that can affect their development and final phenotype (i.e., maternal effects). However, the way such effects modulate offspring phenotype, in particular their immunity, remains unclear. To test the impact of maternal effects on offspring development, we treated wild breeding house sparrows (Passer domesticus) in Sevilla, SE Spain with Newcastle disease virus (NDV) vaccine. Female parents were vaccinated when caring for first broods, eliciting a specific immune response to NDV. The immune response to the same vaccine, and to the PHA inflammatory test were measured in 11-day-old chicks from their following brood. Vaccinated chicks from vaccinated mothers developed a stronger specific response that was related to maternal NDV antibody concentration while rearing their chicks. The chicks’ carotenoid concentration and total antioxidant capacity in blood were negatively related to NDV antibody concentration, whereas no relation with PHA response was found. Specific NDV antibodies could not be detected in 11-day-old control chicks from vaccinated mothers, implying that maternally transmitted antibodies are not directly involved but may promote offspring specific immunity through a priming effect, while other immunity components remain unaffected. Maternally transmitted antibodies in the house sparrow are short-lived, depend on maternal circulation levels and enhance pre-fledging chick specific immunity when exposed to the same pathogens as the mothers.
Is Video Enjoyment Deeper for Those with ADHD

Is Video Enjoyment Deeper for Those with ADHD? Daisy Kristina Milman School of Communications, BYU Master of Arts To find if video enjoyment was deeper for people with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactive disorder) than for their non-ADHD peers, subjects with ADHD, and without, had their eye movement tracked during video exposure to determine average saccade rates. I interviewed subjects using pre-tested statements to establish periods of flow state (a measure of enjoyment). Results indicate that there is a deeper sense of enjoyment for people with ADHD, as subjects with ADHD passed a greater average time in flow state during video consumption (27% compared to 21%). Furthermore, the effects of flow state on the eye movement of those with ADHD was much greater than the effects of flow state on the eye movement of the non-ADHD control group. Average saccade rates jumped up 0.15 saccades per second when comparing outof-flow to in-flow states for the ADHD group, while the average saccade rate for the non-ADHD group increased only 0.03 saccades per second when comparing out-of-flow to in-flow states. This helps further understanding of why people with ADHD consume more screen time than their non-ADHD peers; they may be more inclined to choose video consumption as an activity since the enjoyment they receive from video consumption is deeper and more frequent.