Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maternal Death and Potential Years of Life Lost (PYLL) in Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 2000 and 2014

Introduction: Indicators of maternal health are often used to evaluate the social development and overall health of a population, as well as the accessibility of health services. Among these indicators, the Potential Years of Life Lost, which is associated with maternal deaths, is useful for the definition of priorities, monitoring, evaluation, and intervention, identifying the highest risk groups. Objective: To analyze the Potential Years of Life Lost by maternal death in Santa Catarina in 2000 and 2014. Method: An Ecological study with exploratory spatial analysis was conducted with data obtained from the Information System on Mortality and Live Births. Results: In the Information System, 35 maternal deaths in the year 2000 were identified and 24 in 2014. The total estimated years of life lost were 845 years in 2000 and 780 years in 2014, dominated by direct obstetric causes. In 2000, women who died lost, on average, 39.8 years of life; and 41.5 years in 2014. Conclusion: The spatial pattern observed in 2000 highlights areas of high risk in different regions of Santa Catarina. The greatest loss of years occurred in younger women, confirming the need to prevent and control maternal mortality and review strategies for compliance with public policies in the State.
Model-based Characterization of the Parameters of Dissimilatory Sulfate Reduction Under the Effect of Different Initial Density of Desulfovibrio piger Vib-7 Bacterial Cells

The objective of this study was to design a model of dissimilatory sulfate reduction process using the Verhulst function, with a particular focus on the kinetics of bacterial growth, sulfate and lactate consumption, and accumulation of hydrogen sulfide and acetate. The effect of the initial density (0.12±0.011, 0.25±0.024, 0.5±0.048 and 1.0±0.096 mg cells/ml of medium) of the sulfate-reducing bacteria Desulfovibrio piger Vib-7 on the growth and dissimilatory sulfate reduction was studied. The exponential growth phase of the D. piger Vib-7 was observed for 72 hours of cultivation at the (0.12 and 0.25 mg/ml) initial concentration of bacterial cells. Sulfate and lactate were consumed incompletely during this time. The increase in the initial concentration of cells to 0.5 and 1 mg/ml led to a shortening of the exponential bacterial growth phase and a shift to the stationary phase of the growth. In the case of 0.5 mg/ml seeding, the stationary growth phase was observed in the 36th hour of cultivation. The increase in the initial concentration of cells to 1 mg/ml led to the beginning of the stationary growth phase in 24th hours of cultivation. Under these conditions, sulfate and lactate were consumed completely in the 48th hour of cultivation. The kinetic analysis of the curves of bacterial growth and the process of dissimilatory sulfate reduction by D. piger Vib-7 was carried out.
Novel architectures for efficient (m, n) parallel counters

Parallel counters are key elements in many arithmetic circuits, especially fast multipliers. In this paper, novel architectures and designs for high speed, low power (3,2), (7,3), (15,4) and (31,5) counters capable of operating at ultra-low voltages are presented. Based on these counters, a generalized architecture is derived for large (m, n) parallel counters. The proposed architecture lays emphasis on the use of multiplexers and a combination of CMOS and transmission gate logic in arithmetic circuits that result in high speed and efficient design. The proposed counter designs have been compared with existing designs and are shown to achieve an improvement of about 45% in delay and a reduction of about 25% in power consumption.
Temperature-aware Task Partitioning for Real-Time Scheduling in Embedded Systems

Both power and heat density of on-chip systems are in- creasing exponentially with Moore's Law. High temperature negatively affects reliability as well the costs of cooling and packaging. In this paper, we propose task partitioning as an effective way to reduce the peak temperature in embedded systems running either a set of periodic heterogeneous tasks with common period or periodic heterogeneous tasks with individual period. For task sets with common period, experimental results show that our task partitioning algorithms is able to reduce the peak temperature by as much as 5.8°C as compared to algorithms that only use task sequencing. For task sets with individual period, EDF scheduling with task partitioning can also lower the peak temperature, as compared to simple EDF scheduling, by as much as 6°C. Our analysis indicates that the numbers of additional context switches (overhead) is less than 2 per task, which is tolerable in many practical scenarios.
Social Media Analysis via Network Approaches

Social media such as online forum and weblog are composed of dense interactions between user and content where network models are often appropriate for analysis. Using Markov logic network, user participation models can be developed to help us gain insights on the latent base topics of online discussions. Furthermore, joint non-negative matrix factorization model of participation and content data which can be viewed as a bipartite graph model between users and media. The factorizations allows simultaneous automatic discovery of leaders and sub-communities in the online forum as well as the core latent topics in the forum. Results on topic detection of online forums as well as the clustering analysis are given. Part of this work is based on a copyright-free paper that received Best Workshop Paper Award in 2007 IEEE International Conference on EBusiness Engineering Student Workshop.
IS Bibliographic Repository (ISBIB): A Central Repository of Research Information for the IS Community

The IS Bibliographic Repository (ISBIB), a central repository of Information Systems citations and author information, is a shared resource for research and researcher assessment that can support multiple streams of research. The goal of the repository is to capture research citations and other valuable information from all sub-cultures and disciplines within the international IS community, thereby providing a balanced perspective on the state of art in IS research. This repository should lead to a better understanding on the scope and objectives of IS research in general. The repository also aims to be an unbiased data source for bibliometric research, and studies on IS research methods and processes. It currently holds systematic information about 92 journals. In the spirit of community development, the repository is available to the entire IS community, free of charge. This article describes the current state of the repository and invites readers to use it both for their own research and for bibliometric analysis. Because the repository is intended to be a reflection of the global IS community, the authors, who are also its maintainers, encourage IS researchers and journal editors to provide bibliographic information to extend the repository’s usefulness
Classification of Accents of English Speakers by Native Language

Accents can reveal a lot about a person’s background, such as their native language, place of origin, or ethnic background. Being able to recognize different type of accents can also improve the quality of speech to text transcription by allowing for specific preprocessing of recordings based on the type of accent. Our goal is to classify various types of accents, specifically foreign accents, by the native language of the speaker. Given a recording of a speaker speaking a known script of English words, we would like to predict the speaker’s native language.
Lesion Border Detection in Dermoscopy Images Using Ensembles of Thresholding Methods

Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the first step in this analysis. In many cases, the lesion can be roughly separated from the background skin using a thresholding method applied to the blue channel. However, no single thresholding method appears to be robust enough to successfully handle the wide variety of dermoscopy images encountered in clinical practice.
The Maltase Involved in Starch Metabolism in Barley Endosperm Is Encoded by a Single Gene

During germination and early seedling growth of barley (Hordeum vulgare), maltase is responsible for the conversion of maltose produced by starch degradation in the endosperm to glucose for seedling growth. Despite the potential relevance of this enzyme for malting and the production of alcoholic beverages, neither the nature nor the role of maltase is fully understood. Although only one gene encoding maltase has been identified with certainty, there is evidence for the existence of other genes and for multiple forms of the enzyme. It has been proposed that maltase may be involved directly in starch granule degradation as well as in maltose hydrolysis. The aim of our work was to discover the nature of maltase in barley endosperm. We used ion exchange chromatography to fractionate maltase activity from endosperm of young seedlings, and we partially purified activity for protein identification. We compared maltase activity in wild-type barley and transgenic lines with reduced expression of the previously-characterised maltase gene Agl97, and we used genomic and transcriptomic information to search for further maltase genes. We show that all of the maltase activity in the barley endosperm can be accounted for by a single gene, Agl97. Multiple forms of the enzyme most likely arise from proteolysis and other post-translational modifications.
ModeRNA: a tool for comparative modeling of RNA 3D structure

RNA is a large group of functionally important biomacromolecules. In striking analogy to proteins, the function of RNA depends on its structure and dynamics, which in turn is encoded in the linear sequence. However, while there are numerous methods for computational prediction of protein three-dimensional (3D) structure from sequence, with comparative modeling being the most reliable approach, there are very few such methods for RNA. Here, we present ModeRNA, a software tool for comparative modeling of RNA 3D structures. As an input, ModeRNA requires a 3D structure of a template RNA molecule, and a sequence alignment between the target to be modeled and the template. It must be emphasized that a good alignment is required for successful modeling, and for large and complex RNA molecules the development of a good alignment usually requires manual adjustments of the input data based on previous expertise of the respective RNA family. ModeRNA can model post-transcriptional modifications, a functionally important feature analogous to post-translational modifications in proteins. ModeRNA can also model DNA structures or use them as templates. It is equipped with many functions for merging fragments of different nucleic acid structures into a single model and analyzing their geometry. Windows and UNIX implementations of ModeRNA with comprehensive documentation and a tutorial are freely available.
ADROIT: Automatic Discourse Relation Organizer of Internet-based Text

The ADROIT system that we are developing allows automatic discourse analysis of information rich natural language texts extracted directly from the web. We use guidelines and relations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose texts into elementary segments and to perform the discourse parsing between them. In this paper, we present version 1.0 of ADROIT and focus on the noble technique of cue-phrase disambiguation and machine learning for identification and organization of discourse relations.
Annotation of Anaphoric Expressions in an Aligned Bilingual Corpus

This paper discusses a French-English corpus annotated and aligned at anaphoric level. It also presents an annotation scheme based on the study of a detailed corpus featuring different types of correspondences and mismatches. The scheme which is adapted from EAGLES recommendations, supports the alignment at anaphoric level and caters for the different kinds of mismatches.
Effects of Piperaquine, Chloroquine, and Amodiaquine on Drug Uptake and of These in Combination with Dihydroartemisinin against Drug-Sensitive and -Resistant Plasmodium falciparum Strains

ABSTRACT Piperaquine is being developed as a long-acting component in artemisinin combination therapies. It was highly active in vitro and drug interaction studies showed that dihydroartemisinin combinations with piperaquine, chloroquine, and amodiaquine were indifferent tending toward antagonism. Competitive uptake of radiolabeled chloroquine and dihydroartemisinin in combination with other antimalarials was observed.
Mining of Rare Itemsets in Distributed Environment

mining of rare itemsets involves finding rarely occurring items. It is difficult to mine rare itemsets with a single minimum support (minsup) constraint because low minsup can result in generating too many rules in which some of them can be uninteresting (3). In the literature (4, 5), "multiple minsup framework" was proposed to efficiently discover rare itemsets. However, that model still extracts uninteresting rules if the items' frequencies in a dataset vary widely. In this paper, we are using the notion of "item-to-pattern difference" and multiple minsup based FP-growth-like approach proposed in (6) to efficiently discover rare itemsets in the distributed environment. To discover global rare itemsets in distributed environment, information regarding itemsets of local sites is collected in the form of MIS-tree at one site; that is, each site sends its local MIS-tree to a single site where a global MIS- tree will be constructed from all the MIS-trees received from all the sites. This global MIS-tree is mined to generate global rare itemsets. Experimental results show that this approach is efficient in terms of communication bandwidth consumed.
Promoting Toddlers' Positive Social-Emotional Outcomes in Low-Income Families: A Play-Based Experimental Study

This multimethod study of mothers and toddlers (a) examined the effectiveness of a play-based intervention (child-oriented play vs. play-as-usual) on children's cooperation with their mothers and socioemotional competence; (b) introduced a robust new measure of maternal engagement in the intervention, reflected in the dose of child-oriented play the mother delivered to the child; and (c) examined ecological factors that predicted maternal engagement, and the effect of engagement on the outcomes. Low-income mothers (N = 186, 11% Latino, 27% minority) were randomized into child-oriented play group or play-as-usual group, participated in 8 play sessions, and played daily with their children for 10 weeks. Microscopic coding of mothers’ behavior in play sessions assessed the dose of child-oriented play delivered to children; mothers’ diaries assessed time in daily play. Children's cooperation with maternal control, observed in the laboratory, and mother-rated competence were measured before randomization (Pretest), after play sessions (Posttest 1), and 6 months later (Posttest 2). Children in both groups made significant gains in both outcomes. The gains in cooperation appeared longer lasting in child-oriented play group. Both groups made significantly greater gains than a “historical community control” group, an unrelated longitudinal study without any intervention. Structural equation analyses revealed that married mothers and those with fewer children delivered higher doses of child-oriented play, and those doses predicted children's higher cooperation and competence, with the effects of earlier scores covaried. The dose of time spent in daily play had no effect. Child-oriented play may be a promising, effective, and inexpensive means of promoting toddlers’ positive development.
Feedforward networks training speed enhancement by optimal initialization of the synaptic coefficients

This letter aims at determining the optimal bias and magnitude of initial weight vectors based on multidimensional geometry. This method ensures the outputs of neurons are in the active region and the range of the activation function is fully utilized. In this letter, very thorough simulations and comparative study were performed to validate the performance of the proposed method. The obtained results on five well-known benchmark problems demonstrate that the proposed method deliver consistent good results compared with other weight initialization methods.
Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors are expressed by most parvalbumin-immunoreactive neurons in area MT of the macaque

In the mammalian neocortex, cells that express parvalbumin (PV neurons) comprise a dominant class of inhibitory neuron that substantially overlaps with the fast/narrow‐spiking physiological phenotype. Attention has pronounced effects on narrow‐spiking neurons in the extrastriate cortex of macaques, and more consistently so than on their broad‐spiking neighbors. Cortical neuromodulation by acetylcholine (ACh) is a candidate mechanism for aspects of attention and in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the macaque, receptors for ACh (AChRs) are strongly expressed by inhibitory neurons. In particular, most PV neurons in macaque V1 express m1 muscarinic AChRs and exogenously applied ACh can cause the release of γ‐aminobutyric acid. In contrast, few PV neurons in rat V1 express m1 AChRs. While this could be a species difference, it has also been argued that macaque V1 is anatomically unique when compared with other cortical areas in macaques.
REGAINER : A Context based Data Retrieval System

In searching, reading, writing and collecting lots of information from local computer or web. Retrieving information from the web is time consuming activity and most of the time the input queries from users are repeated.A context-based information refinding system called Regainer. It uses human’s natural recall characteristics so that users can refind files and web pages according to the previous access context. Regainer refinds information based on query by context model over context memory snapshot. Context instances are clustered and required result is retrieved.
Myeloid-Related Proteins Rapidly Modulate Macrophage Nitric Oxide Production during Innate Immune Response1

S100A8 and S100A9 are intracellular calcium-binding proteins produced by myeloid cells that promote neutrophil/monocyte recruitment at inflamed tissues by enhancing attachment to endothelial cells. Although the intracellular functions of these proteins, i.e., myeloid-related proteins (MRP)-8 and MRP-14, are not completely understood, these proteins exhibit prominent extracellular cytokine-like functions and are considered reliable markers of inflammation in diverse diseases. As S100A8 and S100A9 have been reported to be rapidly released in response to components derived from infectious agents, we hypothesized that they play an important role in the modulation of key microbicidal phagocyte functions. In this study, we report for the first time that MRPs are powerful inducers of NO production by murine macrophages (Mφ). This increase in NO production was linked to an increased inducible NO synthase expression both at gene and protein level. This induction was concomitant with an important phosphorylation of SAPK/JNK, but also of MEK and ERK kinases. Upon stimulation with MRPs, NF-κB was rapidly translocated to the nucleus (30 min). When Mφ were treated concomitantly with IFN-γ, another activator of Mφ functions, we observed a strong synergy in NO production, synergy that resulted from the engagement of exclusive signaling pathways: SAPK/JNK, ERK and NF-κB were involved in signaling of MRPs, whereas IFN-γ uses the JAK/STAT pathway. This suggests that the synergy results from interactions of transcription factors in the promoter region. Finally, we observed this effect to be dependent on TLR4. Collectively, our study unravels the importance of MRPs as potent new inducers of Mφ NO production.
New Polymorphic Microsatellite Markers Able To Distinguish among Candida parapsilosis Sensu Stricto Isolates

ABSTRACT Among the Candida species causing bloodstream infections, Candida parapsilosis is one of the most frequently isolated. The objective of the present work was the identification of new microsatellite loci able to distinguish among C. parapsilosis isolates. DNA sequences with trinucleotide repeats were selected from the C. parapsilosis genome database. PCR primer sets flanking the microsatellite repeats were designed and tested with 20 independent isolates. On the basis of the amplification efficiency, specificity, and observed polymorphism, four of the sequences were selected for strain typing. Two hundred thirty-three independent C. parapsilosis sensu stricto isolates were genotyped by using these markers. The polymorphic loci exhibited from 20 to 42 alleles and 39 to 92 genotypes. In a multiplex analysis, 192 genotypes were obtained and the combined discriminatory power of the four microsatellites was 0.99. Reproducibility was demonstrated by submission of subcultures of 4 isolates each, in triplicate, interspersed with unique numbers among a group of 30 isolates for blind testing. Comparison of the genotypes obtained by microsatellite analysis and those obtained by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA analysis, restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis, and internal transcribed sequence grouping was performed and showed that the microsatellite method could distinguish individual isolates; none of the other methods could do that. Related species, C. orthopsilosis and C. metapsilosis, were not confused with C. parapsilosis sensu stricto. These new microsatellites are a valuable tool for use for the differentiation of C. parapsilosis sensu stricto strains, vital in epidemiology to answer questions of strain relatedness and determine pathways of transmission.
A Novel Bone Morphogenetic Protein 2 Mutant Mouse, nBmp2NLStm, Displays Impaired Intracellular Ca2+ Handling in Skeletal Muscle

We recently reported a novel form of BMP2, designated nBMP2, which is translated from an alternative downstream start codon and is localized to the nucleus rather than secreted from the cell. To examine the function of nBMP2 in the nucleus, we engineered a gene-targeted mutant mouse model (nBmp2NLStm) in which nBMP2 cannot be translocated to the nucleus. Immunohistochemistry demonstrated the presence of nBMP2 staining in the myonuclei of wild type but not mutant skeletal muscle. The nBmp2NLStm mouse exhibits altered function of skeletal muscle as demonstrated by a significant increase in the time required for relaxation following a stimulated twitch contraction. Force frequency analysis showed elevated force production in mutant muscles compared to controls from 10 to 60 Hz stimulation frequency, consistent with the mutant muscle's reduced ability to relax between rapidly stimulated contractions. Muscle relaxation after contraction is mediated by the active transport of Ca2+ from the cytoplasm to the sarcoplasmic reticulum by sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA), and enzyme activity assays revealed that SERCA activity in skeletal muscle from nBmp2NLStm mice was reduced to approximately 80% of wild type. These results suggest that nBMP2 plays a role in the establishment or maintenance of intracellular Ca2+ transport pathways in skeletal muscle.