Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Subunit Approach to Evaluation of the Immune Protective Potential of Leptospiral Antigens

ABSTRACT Leptospirosis is the most widespread zoonosis in the world. Current vaccines are based on whole-cell preparations that cause severe side effects and do not induce satisfactory immunity. In light of the leptospiral genome sequences recently made available, several studies aimed at identification of protective recombinant immunogens have been performed; however, few such immunogens have been identified. The aim of this study was to evaluate 27 recombinant antigens to determine their potential to induce an immune response protective against leptospirosis in the hamster model. Experiments were conducted with groups of female hamsters immunized with individual antigen preparations. Hamsters were then challenged with a lethal dose of Leptospira interrogans. Thirteen antigens induced protective immune responses; however, only recombinant proteins LIC10325 and LIC13059 induced significant protection against mortality. These results have important implications for the development of an efficacious recombinant subunit vaccine against leptospirosis.
Computer Generation of Random Variables Using the Ratio of Uniform Deviates

The ratio-of-uniforms method for generating random variables having continuous nonuniform distributions is presented. In thin method a point is generated uniformly over a particular region of the plane. The ratio of the coordinate values of thin point yields a deviate with the desired distribution. Algorithms which utilize this techmque are generally short and often as fast as longer algorithms.
Processor Memory System Veriﬁcation using DOGReL: a language for specifying End-to-End properties

—The memory subsystem of a microprocessor is responsible for scheduling memory accesses as efﬁciently as possible, hiding latency costs from the Data Processing Unit and, ideally, minimizing power costs. For ARM processors, requirements on ordering and completion of memory accesses from the ARM Architecture and relevant bus protocols specify an envelope of acceptable behavior that must be maintained by the schedule. Consequently, any given sequence of instructions can be satisﬁed by a range of different schedules. Verifying the correctness of the memory subsystem is therefore a complex task, often on the critical path to release. Inspired by earlier work on specifying end-to-end properties we developed a language of Directed Observer Graphs (DOGReL) capable of expressing implementation independent properties at a level of abstraction between architecture and micro-architecture that specify the behavior of the memory subsystem. These properties are then translated into System Verilog monitors which can be applied for bug-hunting at the RTL level using commercial Model Checking tools. During a recent micro-controller design project at ARM these properties proved highly valuable in detecting bugs earlier in the design cycle than simulation. The process of writing an unambiguous speciﬁcation also exposed early design ﬂaws and provided clearer documentation of the required behaviors for engineers.
An Interview with Sandro Mezzadra

Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Bologna, where he teaches contemporary political theory and postcolonial studies. He is a member of the directors' board of Studi Culturali and of the editorial board of Filosofia Politica. He has been a frequent interlocutor with Eè tienne Balibar on issues relating to Europe and has emerged as a leading voice of postworkerism and advocate for critical studies of migration. His latest adventure expands his deep engagements with social movements in Europe and North Africa to an international project on Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders with `platforms' in Shanghai, Kolkata, and Sydney. On 9 November 2010, in Chapel Hill, geographers John Pickles and Sebastian Cobarrubias and anthropologist Maribel Casas met with Sandro Mezzadra to discuss complementarities in research interests around the emerging institutions, practices, and geographies of the European Neighbourhood Policy; transit migration and migration routes management; countermapping; and the changes in sovereignty and border policies currently occurring in the Euro-Mediterranean region. Our paths had crossed indirectly several times in the past through sharing experiences with social movements and activist efforts (mainly Frassanito, NoBorder, MigrEurope, or Precarias a la Deriva) that were working on similar issues to those we are working on today: new conceptions of rights and mobility, new understandings of borders and policing, and the reinsertion of migrant struggles in a broader social space. The political and intellectual challenges faced by these struggles had led to many of Mezzadra's and our own research concerns. Mezzadra's theoretical work on migration is a particularly important reference point for our current research on European border externalization and its implications for the geographies of migration routes management in North Africa. Mezzadra has been particularly active in developing a new lexicon in ways that move beyond workerism and narrowly defined class politics to theories of society and space that take much more seriously the partial autonomy of different kinds of work and experience and the spatialities they produce. In engaging with him on these issues, we became increasingly aware that his thinking has been influenced in interesting ways by his reading of geography and cartography. This interview focuses on Mezzadra's engagement with social movements and the emerging geographical imaginaries and logics that are shaping life in and beyond Europe. The interview is followed by a selected bibliography of works by Mezzadra. An interview with Sandro Mezzadra
Software evaluation via users' feedback at runtime

Users' evaluation of software at runtime is a powerful tool which enables us to capture and communicate a richer and updated knowledge on how users view software throughout its life cycle. Users understand the software as a means to meet their requirements and, thus, giving them a voice in the continuous runtime evaluation of software would naturally need to fit this level of abstraction. That is, users' evaluation feedback would mainly communicate their judgment on the role of the system in meeting their requirements. Users' runtime evaluation feedback could be used to take autonomous or semi-autonomous runtime adaptation decisions or to support developers on taking evolution and maintenance decisions. Within this picture, our research focuses on to the development of a modeling and elicitation framework of users' evaluation feedback at runtime. This includes devising mechanisms to structure such an evaluation feedback in a way that makes it easy for users to express and developers to interpret. We motivate our work and articulate the problem and the set of research questions to address in our research and the method to follow and reach them. We also discuss our initial results on the topic.
Integrating elliptic curve cryptography into the web's security infrastructure

RSA is the most popular public-key cryptosystem on the Web today but long-term trends such as the proliferation of smaller, simpler devices and increasing security needs will make continued reliance on RSA more challenging over time. We offer Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as a suitable alternative and describe our integration of this technology into several key components of the Web's security infrastructure. We also present experimental results quantifying the benefits of using ECC for secure web transactions.
Analysis of rigorous orientation models for pushbroom sensors. Applications with quickbird

The correct georeferencing of remote sensing images is a fundamental task in the photogrammetric processing for orthoimages and DEM generation and for feature extraction. In this paper we focus on the georeferencing of pushbroom sensors with rigorous models, that is, approaches that are based on the photogrammetric collinearity equations and describe the exact acquisition geometry of the sensors. By solving a bundle adjustment, the sensor external orientation and additional geometric parameters describing the internal orientation are estimated. We tested two rigorous models developed in academic groups for the georeferencing of a stereopair from QuickBird. The first model (Ml) has been implemented at the University La Sapienza, Rome. It is specifically designed for the orthorectification of pushbroom sensors carried on satellite platforms with asynchronous acquisition mode, like EROS-A and QuickBird. The model, implemented in the software SISAR, reconstructs of the orbital segment during the image acquisition through the knowledge of Keplerian orbital parameters, the sensor attitude, internal orientation and the self-calibration parameters. The second model (M2) is a rigorous sensor model for pushbroom linear array sensors, carried on airborne or spaceborne platforms. It estimates the parameters modelling the sensor internal and external orientation through a bundle adjustment, using a suitable number of ground control points. Our research included the orientation of the single images with rigorous model M 1, the orientation of the stereo pair with rigorous model M2 and the comparison of the results with a rigorous model contained in commercial software (PCI OrthoEngine). The results demonstrate that by using rigorous models it is possible to achieve RMSE smaller than 1 pixel in the CPs if a sufficient number of GCPs are used.
An experimental evaluation of similarity measures for uncertain time series

Uncertain time series analysis is important in applications such as wireless sensor networks and location-based services. This has been the subject of some recent studies, and a number of solution techniques have been proposed for similarity search problems. We classify the proposed similarity measures into deterministic, which returns a value, and probabilistic, which returns a random variable. By means of our classification, we present an overview of the proposed similarity measures and evaluate them experimentally. We conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation of these techniques through numerous experiments using the well-known real-life UCR benchmark data. As the computational complexity of some of these similarity measures was very high, we devised an effective sampling-based heuristic method to complete the experiments which could not be done before. The results of our experimental evaluation and comparison provide useful insights and guidelines for researchers and practitioners in similarity search and analysis of uncertain time series data.
Contrasting Use of CCR5 Structural Determinants by R5 and R5X4 Variants within a Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Primary Isolate Quasispecies

ABSTRACT Macrophagetropic R5 human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) isolates often evolve into dualtropic R5X4 variants during disease progression. The structural basis for CCR5 coreceptor function has been studied in a limited number of prototype strains and suggests that R5 and R5X4 Envs interact differently with CCR5. However, differences between unrelated viruses may reflect strain-specific factors and do not necessarily represent changes resulting from R5 to R5X4 evolution of a virus in vivo. Here we addressed CCR5 domains involved in fusion for a large set of closely related yet functionally distinct variants within a primary isolate swarm, employing R5 and R5X4 Envs derived from the HIV-1 89.6PI quasispecies. R5 variants of 89.6PI could fuse using either N-terminal or extracellular loop CCR5 sequences in the context of CCR5/CXCR2 chimeras, similar to the unrelated R5 strain JRFL, but R5X4 variants of 89.6PI were highly dependent on the CCR5 N terminus. Similarly, R5 89.6PI variants and isolate JRFL tolerated N-terminal CCR5 deletions, but fusion by most R5X4 variants was markedly impaired. R5 89.6PI Envs also tolerated multiple extracellular domain substitutions, while R5X4 variants did not. In contrast to CCR5 use, fusion by R5X4 variants of 89.6PI was largely independent of the CXCR4 N-terminal region. Thus, R5 and R5X4 species from a single swarm differ in how they interact with CCR5. These results suggest that R5 Envs possess a highly plastic capacity to interact with multiple CCR5 regions and support the concept that viral evolution in vivo results from the emergence of R5X4 variants with the capacity to use the CXCR4 extracellular loops but demonstrate less-flexible interactions with CCR5 that are strongly dependent on the N-terminal region.
Academic Performance of Only Children Who Monopolize Parental Resources

Resource dilution theory suggests that many parental resources are dilutable and thus are responsible for the negative effect of sibship size on educational outcomes. However, the special case of only children has rarely been investigated. Analyzing Taiwan Education Panel Survey (TEPS), this study finds that only children do not quite fit this pattern. Birth order also complicates the picture. Controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES), the majority of firstborns outperform only children in academic performance; other peers from small-sized families fare just as well as only children in spite of their disadvantage in obtaining parental resources. Several related factors have been controlled (including parents’ old age, poor health, marital discords, marital dissolution, and the child’s developmental problems). As these alternative accounts have been ruled out, lacking sibling interaction is very likely to be the major cause why only children do not fit the pattern of negative sibship size effect, an association predicted by resource dilution theory.
CD14, TLR4 and TRAM Show Different Trafficking Dynamics During LPS Stimulation

Toll‐like receptor 4 (TLR4) is responsible for the immediate response to Gram‐negative bacteria and signals via two main pathways by recruitment of distinct pairs of adaptor proteins. Mal‐MyD88 [Mal (MyD88‐adaptor‐like) ‐ MYD88 (Myeloid differentiation primary response gene (88))] is recruited to the plasma membrane to initiate the signaling cascade leading to production of pro‐inflammatory cytokines while TRAM‐TRIF [TRAM (TRIF‐related adaptor molecule)‐TRIF (TIR‐domain‐containing adapter‐inducing interferon‐β)] is recruited to early endosomes to initiate the subsequent production of type I interferons. We have investigated the dynamics of TLR4 and TRAM during lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation. We found that LPS induced a CD14‐dependent immobile fraction of TLR4 in the plasma membrane. Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRF) revealed that LPS stimulation induced clustering of TLR4 into small punctate structures in the plasma membrane containing CD14/LPS and clathrin, both in HEK293 cells and the macrophage model cell line U373‐CD14. These results suggest that laterally immobilized TLR4 receptor complexes are being formed and prepared for endocytosis. RAB11A was found to be involved in localizing TRAM to the endocytic recycling compartment (ERC) and to early sorting endosomes. Moreover, CD14/LPS but not TRAM was immobilized on RAB11A‐positive endosomes, which indicates that TRAM and CD14/LPS can independently be recruited to endosomes.
A method based on Center Pattern Generator for quadruped leg control

In traditional strategy based on Center Pattern Generator (CPG), stance phases and swing phases are always fixed and their durations equal to each other approximately. Few CPG models care about the control of the knee joints under quadrupeds. In view of these deficiencies, this paper presents a model which is used to generate trajectories both for hips and for knees. The model has two desirable properties relative to the conventions. First, the knee joints are integrated with the hip joints into the CPG model. Then, a selector can adjust the duration of the stance phases and of the swing phases. Further more, the idea of the selector isn't confined to a specific neural oscillator or an explicit model. Experiments demonstrate that the model is effective for legged robots control and its ratio of phases can be varied flexibly.
Towards a Geographic Data Warehouse for Water Resources Management

The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become strategic tools in many fields such as communications, water resources and natural risks management. In parallel with the growth of this technology occurred the expansion of data warehouses (DW), which are most representative of Decision Support Systems. The similarities in the decisional trends between DW and GIS have inevitably led to merge them in a new single technology: Geographic Data Warehouses (GDW). In order to benefit from the power of dedicated DW tools, such as Online Analytical Process (OLAP), and data mining, several works have contributed to define a geographic adaptation of data warehouses concepts. This paper shows the impact of combining the power of GIS and DW to construct a geographic data warehouse. We propose a general frame to design a geographic data warehouse applied to water resources management.
Relevance tuning in content-based retrieval of structurally-modeled images using Particle Swarm Optimization

Similarity of images in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a subjective measure varying by the user, and requires tuning according to the user's preference. Another issue in CBIR is the need of partial image matching. Structural modeling of the images can be promising in finding a small query image within a large database image. In this work, a graph-based image modeling which assigns image regions to labeled nodes and their adjacency to weighted edges is used. Also, the image similarity measure is tuned according to the user's evaluation, by way of parameter selection using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)[1][2]. In the experiments, a small-scale CBIR system based on graph modeling of images was developed. Using the system, it was confirmed that images including the query image of different size and rotation angle could be successfully retrieved. Also, the user's preference in weighting the different aspects of similarity in the feedback information was found to be successfully incorporated in the retrieval after parameter optimization using PSO.
The forced oscillation technique in children with respiratory disease

The single‐frequency forced oscillation technique was used to estimate the total respiratory impedance, resistance, and reactance at 2, 4, and 12 Hz of children who had cricoid stenosis (CS; n = 11), provoked bronchoconstriction (PB; n = 6), or cystic fibrosis (CF; n = 13). The selection criteria for patients who had CS and CF were abnormal forced expiratory volume in 1 sec (FEV! ) and/or maximal expiratory flow at 50% vital capacity (Vmax 50%). Sixteen of the 17 patients who had CS or PB were found to have resistance (Rrs) values outside the normal range at 4 Hz; at 2 Hz, 14 were found to have abnormal values and, at 12 Hz, only 9. The reactance in the CS and PB groups was somewhat less discriminative than Rrs at all frequencies. Of the 13 patients who had CF, only 4 had abnormal Rrs values; in this clinical condition, the reactance at 2 Hz was the most discriminative variable, being abnormal in 6 of the 13 patients. Irrespective of the clinical group, the Rrs was, in absolute terms, highest at 2 Hz, and it decreased with increasing frequency. This pattern of negative frequency dependence was, however, not obviously specific for any of the tested clinical conditions and offered no information in addition to a single low‐frequency determination.
The analysis of Kalman filtering algorithm for land vehicle navigation

This paper presents an algorithm based on Kalman filtering approach that is used to estimate position and heading of a land vehicle. Source of data for the system are acquisition of low cost (Global Positioning System) GPS receiver, low cost (microelectromechanical systems) MEMS gyroscope and odometer sensor. The algorithm allows defining current position and heading of vehicle when GPS signal is unavailable. To demonstrate the estimation performance of algorithm the number of experiments was performed. As the result obtained data is described in this paper.
Autophagic flux in glioblastoma cells

Abstract To establish metabolic context for radiation sensitivity by measuring autophagic flux in two different glioblastoma (GBM) cell lines. Clonogenic survival curve analysis of U87 or U251 cells exposed to γ radiation, fast neutrons, a mixed energy neutron beam (METNB) or Auger electrons from a gadolinium neutron capture (GdNC) reaction suggested other factors, beyond a defective DNA damage response, contribute to cell death of U251 cells. Altered tumor metabolism (autophagy) was hypothesized as a factor in U251 cells’ clonogenic response. Each of the four different radiation modalities induced an increase in the number of autophagosomes in both U87 and U251 cells. Changes in the number of autophagosomes can be explained by either induction of autophagy or alterations in autophagic flux so autophagic flux was assayed by p62 immunoblotting or in engineered GBM cells that stably express an autophagy marker protein, LC3B-eGFP-mCherry. Perturbations in later stages of autophagy in U251 cells corresponded with radiation sensitivity of U251 cells irradiated with 10 Gy γ rays. Establishment of altered autophagic flux is a useful biomarker for metabolic stress and provided metabolic context for radiation sensitization to 10 Gy γ rays. These results provide strong evidence for the usefulness of managing tumor cell metabolism as a tool for the enhancement of radiation therapy.
Impulsivity in Non-Suicidal Self-Injurious Adolescents in China

Impulsivity has been proposed as an important risk factor in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI). Yet, research outcomes on the relationship of impulsivity to NSSI have been mixed. The present study clarifies this relationship using event-related potentials (ERPs), along with self-reports and behavioral measures. Study 1 aimed to detect the prediction of emotion dysregulation and impulsivity to NSSI. 820 local common high school students and 72 counterparts with problematic behaviors were surveyed, and then the relation among NSSI, difficulties of emotion regulation (DER) and impulsivity were investigated by self-report measurements. Regression analysis results indicated that both DER and impulsivity could well predict NSSI, and contribution of impulsivity was much bigger than that of DER. In Study 2, a Go/Nogo paradigm was adopted to test the impulsivity of the injurers using behavioural measures and Nogo-N2 of ERPs. Participants were 12 confirmed self-injurious adolescents and 12 typical school middle students chosen from Study 1. The group differences (injurers vs controls) in behavior (response time and false alarm) and ERPs index (N2 amplitude and latency in successful Nogo trials) were analyzed in detail. Results disclosed that the NSSI group’s probability of false alarm was higher than the control group’s probability of false alarm in both Go and Nogo trials. In ERPs experiment, the NSSI group’s N2 amplitudes were significantly higher than the controls in correct Nogo trials, and NSSI group’s N2 latencies were clearly more delayed than the controls’ in correct Nogo trial. Results from Nogo-N2 amplitudes and latencies combining with the topographic maps showed that impulse processes occurred in prefrontal cortex mainly. According to the results from self-reports, behavioural measures and Nogo-N2 of ERPs, it can be concluded that self-injurious adolescents possessed stronger impulsivity; and they needed much more neural energy to fulfill an impulse inhibition; moreover, they were insensitive to Nogo stimuli. The present study is the first to examin Nogo-N2 in NSSI, and provides further evidence for impaired response inhibition in NSSI.