Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Graph-Based Min-# and Error-Optimal Trajectory Simplification Algorithm and Its Extension towards Online Services

Trajectory simplification has become a research hotspot since it plays a significant role in the data preprocessing, storage, and visualization of many offline and online applications, such as online maps, mobile health applications, and location-based services. Traditional heuristic-based algorithms utilize greedy strategy to reduce time cost, leading to high approximation error. An Optimal Trajectory Simplification Algorithm based on Graph Model (OPTTS) is proposed to obtain the optimal solution in this paper. Both min-# and min-e problems are solved by the construction and regeneration of the breadth-first spanning tree and the shortest path search based on the directed acyclic graph (DAG). Although the proposed OPTTS algorithm can get optimal simplification results, it is difficult to apply in real-time services due to its high time cost. Thus, a new Online Trajectory Simplification Algorithm based on Directed Acyclic Graph (OLTS) is proposed to deal with trajectory stream. The algorithm dynamically constructs the breadth-first spanning tree, followed by real-time minimizing approximation error and real-time output. Experimental results show that OPTTS reduces the global approximation error by 82% compared to classical heuristic methods, while OLTS reduces the error by 77% and is 32% faster than the traditional online algorithm. Both OPTTS and OLTS have leading superiority and stable performance on different datasets.
Periapical Status and Quality of Root canal Fillings and Coronal Restorations in Iranian Population

INTRODUCTION This cross-sectional survey determined the dental prevalence of apical periodontitis (AP) in selected Iranian population, and evaluated the influence of the quality of root canal treatment (RCT) and their coronal restorations (CR) on the periapical status. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 1064 panoramic radiographies were evaluated by two observers during 2009. The quality of RCT i.e. length/density of root fillings and CR in addition to periapical status of endodontically treated teeth were recorded. Their interrelationship was analyzed by Chi-squared, logistic regression and Spearman's rho statistics. Hosmer and Lemeshow tests were used for assessing fitness of logistic regression model and one sample k-s test was used for evaluating of normality of the data. RESULTS Our results showed that 527 teeth (52%) of the endodontically treated teeth presented with AP radiographically. The percentages of teeth which fulfilled the criteria of an acceptable RCT or CR radiographically were 42.3 and 62.5 respectively. Incidence of AP among teeth with acceptable RCT (29.1%) was significantly lower than those suffering from unacceptable RCT (68.8%) (P<0.001). Moreover, adequate CR demonstrated a significantly better periapical status (58.6%) compared to teeth with inadequate CR (30.3%) (P<0.001). The incidence of AP ranged from 25.6% (good qualities) to 79.5% (bad qualities) (P<0.001). Cases with both unacceptable RCT/CR were 11 times more likely to have AP than cases with acceptable RCT/CR. The quality of RCT and CR were found to impact the periapical health of endodontically treated teeth. CONCLUSION There are a significant high number of technically unacceptable endodontic and restorative treatments in Iran; therefore considerable efforts are needed to improve the standards of endodontic and restorative treatments.
Microbial biotechnology for enhancing oil recovery : Current developments and future prospects

It is anticipated that over 2 trillion barrels of conventional oil will remain in reservoirs worldwide after conventional recovery methods have been exhausted. Other oil recovery methods depend on many economic and technological limitations. Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR), on the other hand, has been proposed for many years as a cheap and effective alternative to enhance oil recovery as its different processes generally do not depend on oil prices. Microbes offer useful metabolic products such as biosurfactants, biopolymers, biogas, biomass, in addition to bio-acids and bio-solvents for enhancing oil recovery. These bioproducts contribute to different microbial systems which tackle specific problems of oil recovery from a chosen target reservoir. The present review provides an overview of MEOR developments from its early stages until today. Basic aspects of petroleum engineering oil recovery stages and microbial characteristics suitable for MEOR are introduced to better link the two bioengineering technologies. The uses and types of different microbial bioproducts available in literature are reviewed and various recovery mechanisms are discussed. Successful MEOR field trials around the world are summarized which shows the potential of this technology as alternative oil recovery method. However, these processes have not been fully proven and did not receive large attention in the petroleum industry due to several reasons that are also discussed. One major reason is the absence of standardized field results and post trial analysis and the lack of structured research methodology. Also, the inconsistent technical performance and lack of understanding of the mechanism of oil recovery contributed to the fact that MEOR received little interest in the petroleum industry.
Mapping of Functional Domains of the Lipid Kinase Phosphatidylinositol 4-Kinase Type III Alpha Involved in Enzymatic Activity and Hepatitis C Virus Replication

ABSTRACT The lipid kinase phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase III alpha (PI4KIIIα) is an endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident enzyme that synthesizes phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate (PI4P). PI4KIIIα is an essential host factor for hepatitis C virus (HCV) replication. Interaction with HCV nonstructural protein 5A (NS5A) leads to kinase activation and accumulation of PI4P at intracellular membranes. In this study, we investigated the structural requirements of PI4KIIIα in HCV replication and enzymatic activity. Therefore, we analyzed PI4KIIIα mutants for subcellular localization, reconstitution of HCV replication in PI4KIIIα knockdown cell lines, PI4P induction in HCV-positive cells, and lipid kinase activity in vitro. All mutants still interacted with NS5A and localized in a manner similar to that of the full-length enzyme, suggesting multiple regions of PI4KIIIα are involved in NS5A interaction and subcellular localization. Interestingly, the N-terminal 1,152 amino acids were dispensable for HCV replication, PI4P induction, and enzymatic function, whereas further N-terminal or C-terminal deletions were deleterious, thereby defining the minimal PI4KIIIα core enzyme at a size of ca. 108 kDa. Additional deletion of predicted functional motifs within the C-terminal half of PI4KIIIα also were detrimental for enzymatic activity and for the ability of PI4KIIIα to rescue HCV replication, with the exception of a proposed nuclear localization signal, suggesting that the entire C-terminal half of PI4KIIIα is involved in the formation of a minimal enzymatic core. This view was supported by structural modeling of the PI4KIIIα C terminus, suggesting a catalytic center formed by an N- and C-terminal lobe and an armadillo-fold motif, which is preceded by three distinct alpha-helical domains probably involved in regulation of enzymatic activity. IMPORTANCE The lipid kinase PI4KIIIα is of central importance for cellular phosphatidylinositol metabolism and is a key host cell factor of hepatitis C virus replication. However, little is known so far about the structure of this 240-kDa protein and the functional importance of specific subdomains regarding lipid kinase activity and viral replication. This work focuses on the phenotypic analysis of distinct PI4KIIIα mutants in different biochemical and cell-based assays and develops a structural model of the C-terminal enzymatic core. The results shed light on the structural and functional requirements of enzymatic activity and the determinants required for HCV replication.
Experimental evaluation of the QoS of failure detectors on wide area network

This paper describes an experiment performed on wide area network to assess and fairly compare the quality of service provided by a large family of failure detectors. Failure detectors are a popular middleware mechanism used for improving the dependability of distributed systems and applications. Their QoS greatly influences the QoS that upper layers may provide. It is thus of uttermost importance to equip a system with an appropriate failure detector and to properly tune its parameters for the most desirable QoS to be provided. The paper first analyzes the QoS indicators and the structure of push-style failure detectors and then introduces the choices for estimators and safety margins used to build several (30) failure detectors. The experimental setup designed and implemented to allow a fair comparison of QoS of the several alternatives in a real representative experimental setting is then described. Finally the results obtained through the experiments and their interpretation are provided.
A New Entropy-based Vocabulary Optimization Approach for Chinese Language Modeling

This paper proposed a new entropy-based vocabulary optimization approach for Chinese language modeling. This approach aims to directly optimize the language model by extending the vocabulary, that is, to minimize the character perplexity of the language model. A new criterion for new words selection was developed based on the character perplexity metric. A fast computing method and a simple divide-and-conquer method were proposed to deal with very large corpus. Experiments showed about 3% character perplexity reduction and 3% character error rate reduction in a speech recognition task. Comparison experiments were also conducted to compare with other approaches.
Person Re-identification for Real-world Surveillance Systems

Appearance based person re-identification in a real-world video surveillance system with non-overlapping camera views is a challenging problem for many reasons. Current state-of-the-art methods often address the problem by relying on supervised learning of similarity metrics or ranking functions to implicitly model appearance transformation between cameras for each camera pair, or group, in the system. This requires considerable human effort to annotate data (see Section 1.1). Furthermore, the learned models are camera specific and not transferable from one set of cameras to another. Therefore, the annotation process is required after every network expansion or camera replacement, which strongly limits their applicability. Alternatively, we propose a novel mod-eling approach to harness complementary appearance information without supervised learning that significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on multiple benchmark datasets.
DMH1, a Small Molecule Inhibitor of BMP Type I Receptors, Suppresses Growth and Invasion of Lung Cancer

The bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling cascade is aberrantly activated in human non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) but not in normal lung epithelial cells, suggesting that blocking BMP signaling may be an effective therapeutic approach for lung cancer. Previous studies demonstrated that some BMP antagonists, which bind to extracellular BMP ligands and prevent their association with BMP receptors, dramatically reduced lung tumor growth. However, clinical application of protein-based BMP antagonists is limited by short half-lives, poor intra-tumor delivery as well as resistance caused by potential gain-of-function mutations in the downstream of the BMP pathway. Small molecule BMP inhibitors which target the intracellular BMP cascades would be ideal for anticancer drug development. In a zebrafish embryo-based structure and activity study, we previously identified a group of highly selective small molecule inhibitors specifically antagonizing the intracellular kinase domain of BMP type I receptors. In the present study, we demonstrated that DMH1, one of such inhibitors, potently reduced lung cell proliferation, promoted cell death, and decreased cell migration and invasion in NSCLC cells by blocking BMP signaling, as indicated by suppression of Smad 1/5/8 phosphorylation and gene expression of Id1, Id2 and Id3. Additionally, DMH1 treatment significantly reduced the tumor growth in human lung cancer xenograft model. In conclusion, our study indicates that small molecule inhibitors of BMP type I receptors may offer a promising novel strategy for lung cancer treatment.
Third-Person Effects of Health News

This study expands third-person effect research to health news coverage. It examines the perceptual and behavioral components of third-person effects. Moderator variables of third-person effects—knowledge and exposure to health news—are also examined. Using data from a survey of public opinion about the coverage of avian flu involving a probability sample of 1,107 college students in Taiwan, findings show that respondents tend to think the influence of avian flu news on others is greater than on themselves. Furthermore, exposure to avian flu news was found to narrow the self—other perceptual gap. Regarding the linkages between the third-person perception of avian news and behavioral responses to the perception, findings show that perceived effects of avian flu news on the self resulted in taking action—seeking information about avian flu and seeking out Tamiflu. However, findings further show that the third-person perception acted like a brake on taking such action.
At the Heart of Egalitarianism

Work on morality framing has demonstrated that emphasizing moral ideals (vs. obligations) elicits positive intergroup attitudes among Whites (Does, Derks, & Ellemers, 2011). The current research goes beyond self-reported attitudes, by examining the effect of morality framing on more automatic, less consciously controlled responses of Whites. We tested the hypothesis that morality framing affects Whites’ appraisals of equality as challenging (vs. threatening) by measuring cardiovascular reactivity. Thirty-seven native Dutch participants gave an oral presentation of social equality in terms of moral ideals versus obligations, while we measured their motivations with cardiovascular (i.e., challenge vs. threat; Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996) and behavioral (i.e., eager vs. vigilant goal pursuit; Higgins, 1997) indicators. As hypothesized, and in contrast to the obligations frame, the ideals frame was found to motivate advantaged group members to approach and view equality as more of a challenge than a threat.
Warning Drivers about Impending Collisions Using Vibrotactile Flow

Vibrotactile collision warning signals that create a sensation of motion across a driver's body result in faster brake reaction times (BRTs) to potential collision events. To date, however, such warnings have only simulated linear motion. We extended this research by exploring the effectiveness of collision warnings that incorporate vibrotactile patterns or “vibrotactile flow”. In Experiment 1, expanding and contracting vibrotactile flow warnings were compared with a static warning (all tactors activated simultaneously) and a no warning condition in a car following scenario. Both vibrotactile flow warnings produced significantly faster BRTs than the static and no warning conditions. However, there was no directional effect. That is, there was no significant difference between contracting and expanding signals. Warnings that utilize vibrotactile flow therefore appear to provide an effective means of informing drivers about potential collision events. However, unlike comparable warnings utilizing linear motion, their effectiveness does not seem to depend on the precise relationship between the warning and collision events. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a tactile warning incorporating linear motion produced significantly faster BRTs than an expanding vibrotactile flow warning. Taken together, these results suggest that vibrotactile warnings that simulate linear motion may be more effective than vibrotactile flow warnings.
Partial decision ordered successive interference cancellation detection algorithm for VBLAST

The use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver results in enormous capacity increase. As a space-time architecture, VBLAST (vertical Bell laboratories layered space time) has demonstrated very high spectral efficiency. Originally, the BLAST detection scheme, called OSIC (ordered successive interference cancellation), was based on a successive interference cancellation. OSIC suffers from the error propagation problem. In this paper, we present a modified detection algorithm, called PD/spl I.bar/OSIC (partial decision OSIC), which aims at improving the performance of OSIC. It increases the number of candidate symbols, remains all candidate symbols and uses ML detection to detect all substreams at last stage. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtains far better performance than OSIC.
A genomic perspective on protein tyrosine phosphatases: gene structure, pseudogenes, and genetic disease linkage

The protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) are now recognized as critical regulators of signal transduction under normal and pathophysiological conditions. In this analysis we have explored the sequence of the human genome to define the composition of the PTP family. Using public and proprietary sequence databases, we discovered one novel human PTP gene and defined chromosomal loci and exon structure of the additional 37 genes encoding known PTP transcripts. Direct orthologs were present in the mouse genome for all 38 human PTP genes. In addition, we identified 12 PTP pseudogenes unique to humans that have probably contaminated previous bioinformatics analysis of this gene family. PCR amplification and transcript sequencing indicate that some PTP pseudogenes are expressed, but their function (if any) is unknown. Furthermore, we analyzed the enhanced diversity generated by alternative splicing and provide predicted amino acid sequences for four human PTPs that are currently defined by fragments only. Finally, we correlated each PTP locus with genetic disease markers and identified 4 PTPs that map to known susceptibility loci for type 2 diabetes and 19 PTPs that map to regions frequently deleted in human cancers. We have made our analysis available at http://ptp.cshl. edu or http://science.novonordisk. com/ptp and we hope this resource will facilitate the functional characterization of these key enzymes. —Andersen, J. N. , Jansen, P. G. , Echwald, S. M. , Mortensen, O. H. , Fukada, T. , Del Vecchio, R. , Tonks, N. K. , M⊘ller, N. P. H. A genomic perspective on protein tyrosine phosphatases: gene structure, pseudogenes, and genetic disease linkage. FASEB J. 18, 8–30 (2004)
MPath2PN - Translating metabolic pathways into Petri nets

We propose MPath2PN, a tool which automatically trans- lates metabolic pathways, as described in the major biological databases, into corresponding Petri net representations. The aim is to allow for a systematic reuse, in the setting of metabolic pathways, of the variety of tools existing for Petri net analysis and simulation. The current proto- type implementation of MPath2PN inputs the KEGG description of a metabolic pathway and produces two Petri nets, mainly diering for the treatment of ubiquitous substances. Such Petri nets are represented using PNML, a standard format for many Petri net tools. We are extending the tool by considering further formats for metabolic pathways in in- put and for Petri nets in output. MPath2PN is part of a more general project aimed at developing an integrated framework which should oer the possibility of automatically querying databases for metabolic path- ways, producing corresponding Petri net models and performing analysis and simulation on them by means of various tools.
Learning about service user involvement in mental health research

Service user involvement in mental health research is a relatively new concept for health professionals. The aims of this paper were to investigate: how far service user involvement in mental health research appears to have been understood, how far it is happening, reasons why service users get involved in research, and barriers to closer involvement from both service user and researcher perspectives. The literature was examined to explore the extent of service user involvement in mental health research, and ways in which service users are carrying out research. It was concluded that while there is little empirical research in this area, increasingly service user involvement in mental health research can be found in the peer-reviewed domain, and at all levels of the research process. The alternative literature (including what is commonly called the grey literature) offers a rich source to learn from. Consideration of the barriers to closer service user involvement highlights likely challenges to traditional researcher-led ideologies and processes. Declaration of interest: None.
Tight Bounds for Asynchronous Renaming

This article presents the first tight bounds on the time complexity of shared-memory renaming, a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which a set of processes need to pick distinct identifiers from a small namespace. We first prove an individual lower bound of Ω(k) process steps for deterministic renaming into any namespace of size subexponential in k, where k is the number of participants. The bound is tight: it draws an exponential separation between deterministic and randomized solutions, and implies new tight bounds for deterministic concurrent fetch-and-increment counters, queues, and stacks. The proof is based on a new reduction from renaming to another fundamental problem in distributed computing: mutual exclusion. We complement this individual bound with a global lower bound of Ω(k log (k/c)) on the total step complexity of renaming into a namespace of size ck, for any c ≥ 1. This result applies to randomized algorithms against a strong adversary, and helps derive new global lower bounds for randomized approximate counter implementations, that are tight within logarithmic factors. On the algorithmic side, we give a protocol that transforms any sorting network into a randomized strong adaptive renaming algorithm, with expected cost equal to the depth of the sorting network. This gives a tight adaptive renaming algorithm with expected step complexity O(log k), where k is the contention in the current execution. This algorithm is the first to achieve sublinear time, and it is time-optimal as per our randomized lower bound. Finally, we use this renaming protocol to build monotone-consistent counters with logarithmic step complexity and linearizable fetch-and-increment registers with polylogarithmic cost.
Assessing the Utility of Soil DNA Extraction Kits for Increasing DNA Yields and Eliminating PCR Inhibitors from Buried Skeletal Remains

DNA identification of human remains is often necessary when decedents are skeletonized; however, poor DNA recovery and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) inhibition are frequently encountered, a situation exacerbated by burial. In this research, the utility of integrating soil DNA isolation kits into buried skeletal DNA analysis was evaluated and compared to a standard human DNA extraction kit and organic extraction. The soil kits successfully extracted skeletal DNA at quantities similar to standard methods, although the two kits tested, which differ mechanistically, were not equivalent. Further, the PCR inhibitors calcium and humic acid were effectively removed using the soil kits, whereas collagen was less so. Finally, concordant control region sequences were obtained from human skeletal remains using all four methods. Based on these comparisons, soil DNA isolation kits, which quickened the extraction process, proved to be a viable extraction technique for skeletal remains that resulted in positive identification of a decedent.