Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stimulation of Bovine Whole-Blood Samples Cultured in Media Supplemented with Recombinant Interleukin-7 (IL-7) and IL-12 Extends the Life Span of the Gamma Interferon Assay To Detect Mycobacterium bovis-Infected Cattle

ABSTRACT The gamma interferon (IFN-γ) assay is widely used to measure cell-mediated immune (CMI) response for the early detection of tuberculosis infection. Processing whole-blood samples for CMI-based diagnostics is time sensitive and usually must occur within 8 h of collection to ensure optimal assay performance. In this study, we developed and tested a modified protocol, in which whole-blood samples from Mycobacterium bovis-infected cattle were diluted 1:1 in RPMI medium containing 0.3% fetal bovine serum (FBS) added or not to recombinant mouse interleukin-7 (rmIL-7) or rmIL-12, alone or in combination, and stored at 4°C. At 3 and 6 days postcollection, the diluted blood samples were adjusted to 10% FBS, dispensed into culture trays, stimulated with a bovine purified protein derivative from M. bovis, and incubated at 37°C in 5% CO2 in air. Plasma was removed and assayed for an IFN-γ response using bovine IFN-γ enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (Bovigam). The results were then compared with those obtained from the conventional procedure. The IFN-γ responses of the samples stored up to 6 days postcollection in the supplemented RPMI medium were similar to those observed in the samples processed within 8 h after sampling, indicating that lymphocyte vitality and response were preserved. The addition of rmIL-7 and rmIL-12, alone or in combination, to culture medium can enhance lymphocyte survival and thus extends the time limit within which the IFN-γ assay can be applied as a diagnostic tool in bovine tuberculosis surveillance and eradication.
Panel Intensity Models with Latent Factors: An Application to the Trading Dynamics on the Foreign Exchange Market¤

We develop a panel intensity model, with a time varying latent factor, which captures the influence of unobserved time effects and allows for correlation across individuals. The model is designed to analyze individual trading behavior on the basis of trading activity datasets, which are characterized by four dimensions: an irregularly-spaced time scale, trading activity types, trading instruments and investors. Our approach extends the stochastic conditional intensity model of Bauwens & Hautsch (2006) to panel duration data. We show how to estimate the model parameters by a simulated maximum likelihood technique adopting the efficient importance sampling approach of Richard & Zhang (2005). We provide an application to a trading activity dataset from an internet trading platform in the foreign exchange market and we find support for the presence of behavioral biases and discuss implications for portfolio theory.
Student Diversity Augments Studying Sustainability in Higher Education

Since 2000, and especially during the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD 2005–2014), many universities have begun offering educational programmes on sustainability. Over this span, the level and type of diversity among students have only increased. This begs the question: How does university student diversity affect sustainability education? What is productive and confounding about learners’ cultural and academic heterogeneity? This research draws on a literature review, a survey of university students studying sustainability in Japan and an observational study. The results demonstrate that interaction between students from different cultures and disciplines clearly improves skills for sustainability education, especially critical thinking and problem solving. Moreover, the surveyed students expressed interest in and appreciation of opportunities to expose their sustainability research themes to audiences of various research fields.
‘I make the rules on my Wall’: Privacy and identity management practices on Facebook

Much significant work on the topic of privacy and identity on social network sites (SNSs) stems from the realms of media, information and cultural studies, and sociology eschewing language-based disciplines almost entirely. To redress the balance, this article draws on discourse-centred online ethnography, an approach which blends online ethnography with discourse analysis, to explore how self-presentation on Facebook is regulated by means of privacy. To this end, I analyse a dataset of statuses, comments, links, photographs and interviews from five Greek users. The findings highlight users’ creativity and criticality in combining software affordances with linguistic signals and textual practices to manage their privacy and hence their identity.
Birth outcomes for Arabic-named women in California before and after September 11

Persons who were perceived to be Arabs experienced a period of increased harassment, violence, and workplace discrimination in the United States in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001. Drawing on prior studies that have hypothesized that experiences of discrimination increase the risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, this study explores whether there was an effect on birth outcomes for pregnant women of Arab descent. California birth certificate data are used to determine the relative risk of poor birth outcomes by race, ethnicity, and nativity for women who gave birth in the six months following September 2001, compared with the same six calendar months one year earlier. The relative risk of poor birth outcomes was significantly elevated for Arabic-named women and not for any of the other groups.
Evolutionary Visual Exploration: Evaluation With Expert Users

We present an Evolutionary Visual Exploration (EVE) system that combines visual analytics with stochastic optimisation to aid the exploration of multidimensional datasets characterised by a large number of possible views or projections. Starting from dimensions whose values are automatically calculated by a PCA, an interactive evolutionary algorithm progressively builds (or evolves) non‐trivial viewpoints in the form of linear and non‐linear dimension combinations, to help users discover new interesting views and relationships in their data. The criteria for evolving new dimensions is not known a priori and are partially specified by the user via an interactive interface: (i) The user selects views with meaningful or interesting visual patterns and provides a satisfaction score. (ii) The system calibrates a fitness function (optimised by the evolutionary algorithm) to take into account the user input, and then calculates new views. Our method leverages automatic tools to detect interesting visual features and human interpretation to derive meaning, validate the findings and guide the exploration without having to grasp advanced statistical concepts. To validate our method, we built a prototype tool (EvoGraphDice) as an extension of an existing scatterplot matrix inspection tool, and conducted an observational study with five domain experts. Our results show that EvoGraphDice can help users quantify qualitative hypotheses and try out different scenarios to dynamically transform their data. Importantly, it allowed our experts to think laterally, better formulate their research questions and build new hypotheses for further investigation.
Influence of Social Support and Self-Esteem on Maternal-Fetal Attachment in Unmarried Pregnant Women

The present study aimed to identify factors affecting maternal–fetal attachment behaviors among unmarried pregnant women. The research participants included 105 unmarried pregnant women from 15 shelters for unmarried mothers around the country. The data were collected from January to February 2015 through a survey and descriptive statistics, t-tests, ANOVAs, Pearson correlations, and hierarchical regression analysis were analyzed using SPSS 20. The results suggest that current childcare plans and support from friends were significant factors affecting maternal–fetal attachment behaviors. The overall explanatory power of these variables for maternal–fetal attachment behaviors was 30.5%, with friend support being more influential than current childcare plans. This study indicates that prenatal care aimed at enhancing the maternal– fetal attachment of unmarried pregnant women would benefit from taking childcare plans and support from friends into consideration.
Accelerating graph mining algorithms via uniform random edge sampling

The seminal works by Karger [13], [14] have shown that one can use Uniform Random Edge (URE) sampling to generate a graph skeleton which accurately approximates all cut-values in the original graph with high probability under some specific assumptions. As such, the random subgraphs resulted from URE sampling can often be used as substitutes for the original graphs in cut/flow-related graph-optimization problems [14]. In this paper, we extend the results of Karger to show that, besides the value (weight) of the cut-set, the weights of four additional types of edge-set, namely, Volume, Association, Complement Volume and Complement Association, are all well-preserved under URE sampling. More importantly, we show that these well-preserved edge-set metrics have dominant impact on the outcome of common graph-mining tasks including PageRank computation and Community Detection. As a result, URE sampling can be used to accelerate the corresponding graph-mining algorithms with small approximation errors. Via extensive experiments with large-scale graphs in practice, we demonstrate that URE sampling can achieve over 90% accuracy for PageRank computation and Modularity-based Community Detection by sampling only 20% edges of the original graph.
Increasing Payload Capacity of Wearable Robots Using Linear Actuators

Wearable robots for carrying heavy loads in an industrial field should be able to carry a load over their entire range of motion. The payload capacity of a wearable robot employing rotary actuators or linear actuators at the knee joints decreases drastically in the knee-flexion posture, because the moment arm of gravity increases and the moment arm of the force generated by the linear actuators at the knees decreases after a certain point. To resolve this issue, this study proposes two types of sublink mechanisms for the knee joints. With only a few modifications to the existing knee-joint configuration, the moment arm in the knee-flexion posture is increased and the payload capacity is effectively increased, and thus, enabling robot pilots to squat down and stand up with heavy loads. The proposed mechanisms were simulated and tested with a wearable robot, and their effectiveness was verified.
To Nick or Not to Nick: Comparison of I-SceI Single- and Double-Strand Break-Induced Recombination in Yeast and Human Cells

Genetic modification of a chromosomal locus to replace an existing dysfunctional allele with a corrected sequence can be accomplished through targeted gene correction using the cell's homologous recombination (HR) machinery. Gene targeting is stimulated by generation of a DNA double-strand break (DSB) at or near the site of correction, but repair of the break via non-homologous end-joining without using the homologous template can lead to deleterious genomic changes such as in/del mutations, or chromosomal rearrangements. By contrast, generation of a DNA single-strand break (SSB), or nick, can stimulate gene correction without the problems of DSB repair because the uncut DNA strand acts as a template to permit healing without alteration of genetic material. Here, we examine the ability of a nicking variant of the I-SceI endonuclease (K223I I-SceI) to stimulate gene targeting in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and in human embryonic kidney (HEK-293) cells. K223I I-SceI is proficient in both yeast and human cells and promotes gene correction up to 12-fold. We show that K223I I-SceI-driven recombination follows a different mechanism than wild-type I-SceI-driven recombination, thus indicating that the initial DNA break that stimulates recombination is not a low-level DSB but a nick. We also demonstrate that K223I I-SceI efficiently elevates gene targeting at loci distant from the break site in yeast cells. These findings establish the capability of the I-SceI nickase to enhance recombination in yeast and human cells, strengthening the notion that nicking enzymes could be effective tools in gene correction strategies for applications in molecular biology, biotechnology, and gene therapy.
Multiple Transcription Factors Regulate the Inducible Expression of the Human Complement Receptor 2 Promoter1

Complement receptor 2 (CR2) is regulated at the transcriptional level, but the promoter elements and the transcription factors that bind to them and contribute to its regulation are unknown. After documenting that PMA and cAMP induced the activity of the CR2 promoter by 10-fold, we conducted promoter truncation and mutagenesis experiments, in conjunction with shift assays, to determine the functionally important regions of the promoter and the proteins that bind to them. We identified two regions, separated by ∼900 nucleotides, which together were responsible for inducible promoter activity. Mutagenesis of single promoter elements demonstrated a functional upstream stimulatory factor/E box in the TATA box-proximal region and three equally important, closely spaced, CREB/AP-1 half-sites in the upstream promoter region. The cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB)/AP-1 half-sites bound in vitro Jun and CREB that are induced by protein kinases A and/or C. The 900-nucleotide segment stretching between the above two regions had no functional impact on the induced transcription, and its deletion increased the promoter activity. Finally, a region upstream of the distal site had a repressor activity on CR2 transcription. Moreover, IL-4 induced binding of CREB and AP-1 to the upstream promoter elements and resulted in increased CR2 surface protein expression. These studies have characterized regions of the CR2 promoter and the transcription factors that bind to them and are crucial to induced CR2 expression. Our studies may provide insights to novel approaches to modulate B cell function by regulating CR2 gene transcription.
Political Economy of Debt and Growth Appendix

In this Appendix we present additional results for our paper “Political Economy of Debt and Growth. ”In Section 1 we (1) offer a discussion on the relationship to Battaglini and Coate [2008] framework; (2) discuss the relevance of our results for open economies; and (3) elaborate on how the model can be adopted for empirical analysis at high and medium frequencies. In Section 2 we present derivations and proofs of the claims made in the paper. In Section 3 we describe our data sources for the calibration. In Section 4 we develop a version of the model with no growth and quasi-linear preferences. Section 5 offers additional information about the robustness of our numerical results.
Asymmetric Neural Networks with Gabor Filters

To make clear the mechanism of the visual movement is important in he visual system. The prominent feature is the nonlinear characteristics as the squaring and rectification functions, which are observed in the retinal and visual cortex networks. Many popular models for motion processing in cortex, is the use of symmetric quadrature functions with Gabor filters. This paper proposes a new motion sensing processing model in the asymmetric networks. To make clear the behavior of the asymmetric nonlinear network, white noise analysis and Wiener kernels are applied. It is shown that the biological asymmetric network with nonlinearities is effective and superior for generating the directional movement from the network computations. The directive equations for the stimulus were derived by applying the white noise analysis and kernels to characterize stimulus changes. The results are applicable to the V1 and MT model of the neural networks in the cortex.
An optimal control strategy of ballast systems used in ship stabilization

This paper tackles the problematic of ship stabilization using optimal amounts of resources, in the case of loading and unloading operations on docked vessels. A mathematical model linking the ship's positioning and orientation with the forces and moments exerted upon the hull is required in order to develop an optimal control strategy for the ship's stabilizing ballast systems. This strategy is designed using graph theory concepts, and it focuses on generating an optimal command sequence in respect to minimum energy consumption taking into account the ballast system's topology.
Sequential Pre-Coding for MIMO Hybrid ARQ

While the conventional codebook is defined only for the initial transmission in the closed-loop MIMO system, this paper proposes a new retransmission structure with a sequence of multiple codebooks, rather than using a single identical codebook for every retransmission. The pre-coding matrices in each codebook are sequentially linked so that each one can be used for a sequential hybrid ARQ transmission attempt, without invoking any index feedback from the receiver. It has been shown that the proposed codebook structure provides a performance gain of more than 5dB over the conventional scheme in the long-term-static channel.
Building an OMT-editor using design patterns: an experience report

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a customizable editor for OMT/UML style object-models and behavior-models. A number of well known design patterns are used to obtain a flexible architecture that allows to build tool support for our software engineering research requiring variants or add-ons to the basic editors. We report on the difficulties we encountered in applying the Model-View-Control, Observer, Visitor, Iterator, Bridge, Facade and Chain of Responsibility patterns and we evaluate the claims of improved flexibility, modularity, reusability, and understandability as stated in the design pattern literature in general.
Impact of Demographic Variables in the Development of Prospective Teachers' Efficacy Beliefs towards Inclusive Practices in the Context of Pakistan

This study was carried out to find out the role of demographic variables in the development of efficacy beliefs of prospective teachers enrolled in a teacher education program towards inclusion. The sample consisted of 194 prospective teachers enrolled in a one-year teacher education program at a government university in Pakistan. A standardized instrument measuring efficacy towards inclusive practices was employed to gather data from prospective teachers enrolled in a teacher education program. Prospective teachers enrolled in special teacher education program held more efficacious views on using inclusive and collaborative instructions in managing disruptive classroom behaviour of students with disabilities. In the same way, prospective teachers with high levels of training, experience, confidence and a high degree of knowledge about policies relevant to disabled children had a stronger sense of efficacy towards implementing the inclusive practices on each of the three factors: efficacy for inclusive instruction, efficacy in collaboration and efficacy in managing behaviour. © 2013 Published by C-crcs. Peer-review under responsibility of Editor or Guest Editor of the EJSBS.
Nature and severity of lung function abnormalities in extremely pre-term children at 11 years of age

Advances in neonatal care have resulted in increased survival of children born extremely pre-term (EP). Nevertheless the incidence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia and long-term respiratory morbidity remains high. We investigated the nature of pathophysiological changes at 11 yrs of age to ascertain whether respiratory morbidity in EP children primarily reflects alterations in the lung periphery or more centralised airway function in this population. Spirometry, plethysmography, diffusing capacity, exhaled nitric oxide, multiple-breath washout, skin tests and methacholine challenge were used during laboratory-based assessments in a subgroup of the 1995 EPICure cohort and in controls. Results were obtained in 49 EP and 52 control children. Lung function abnormalities were found in 78% of EP children, with evidence of airway obstruction, ventilation inhomogeneity, gas trapping and airway hyperresponsiveness. Levels of atopy and exhaled nitric oxide were similar between the groups. Prior wheeze was associated with significant reductions in forced flows and volumes. By contrast, abnormalities of the lung periphery appear to be mediated primarily through EP birth per se. The prevalence of lung function abnormalities, which is largely obstructive in nature and likely to have long-term implications, remains high among 11-yr-old children born EP. Spirometry proved an effective means of detecting these persistent abnormalities.
Measuring quality of life in depression

This review summarizes recent research into quality of life in depression. Depression has significant effects on quality of life, comparable to chronic medical disorders, but adequate treatment is associated with a significant impact on quality of life. This review focuses on the conceptual and assessment problems, the rationale for assessing quality of life in depression and the influence of the treatment of depressed patients upon quality of life.
DSP-Controlled Test Set-up for the Performance Assessment of an Autonomous Power Unit Equipped with a PEM Fuel Cell

The paper describes a test set-up, based on the use of a digital signal processor (DSP), developed for the evaluation of the operational characteristics of an autonomous auxiliary power unit (APU). The considered APU includes a 4.8 kW commercial proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell and a set of electrochemical batteries. Both power sources are connected to a common AC bus through power electronic converters. The DSP-based test set-up is also conceived so to incorporate the basic functions of the APU energy management system. The paper also presents some experimental results, with particular reference to the assessment of the PEM fuel cell performances.
Executing Query over Encrypted Character Strings in Databases

A query scheme which conducts fast LIKE query and range query over the encrypted character strings in databases is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a characteristics matrix is created for every character string in a sensitive attribute of a table to describe the characteristics of the character string. The characteristics matrix is also extended to describe the characteristics of a Chinese character string. Then the characteristics matrix is compressed to a bit string as the index of the character string and the bit string is stored into an index attribute of the sensitive attribute. Moreover, any LIKE query and range query over the sensitive attribute are converted into the queries over the index attribute. Suitable length m for the index attribute and the number of random functions k are selected after we balance the tradeoff between security and efficiency. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency and performance of queries over the encrypted character string. The experimental results indicate the performance for the queries in our scheme has been improved.