Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular Signature of the Ebola Virus Associated with the Fishermen Community Outbreak in Aberdeen, Sierra Leone, in February 2015

ABSTRACT We report the complete genome sequence of Ebola virus from a health worker linked to a cluster of cases occurring in the fishing community of Aberdeen, Sierra Leone (February 2015), which were characterized by unusually severe presentation. The sequence, clustering in the SL subclade 3.2. 4, harbors mutations potentially relevant for pathogenesis.
Management of acute graft‐versus‐host disease

Acute graft‐versus‐host disease (GvHD) is a frequent complication of allogeneic haemopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and donor lymphocyte infusions (DLI). Its incidence and severity depends on several factors, such as prophylaxis method, donor/recipient matching, intensity of the conditioning regimen and composition of the graft. Significant progress has been made in recent years in understanding the pathogenesis of the disease, and some of these advances have been translated into clinical trials. First‐line treatment of acute GvHD is based on corticosteroids, and produce sustained responses in 50–80% of patients depending on the initial severity. Non‐responders are offered second‐line therapy, with combinations of immunosuppressive agents, but 1‐year survival is 30% in most large trials. New strategies explored include infusion of expanded mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), down regulation of antigen‐presenting cells (APC) and suicide gene transduced T cells. Acute GvHD is complicated by severe immunodeficiency causing life‐threatening infections. To date, GvHD has not been differentiated from the graft‐versus‐leukaemia effect. The present review will discuss some of these aspects.
Cross-media topic detection: A multi-modality fusion framework

Detecting topics from Web data attracts increasing attention in recent years. Most previous works on topic detection mainly focus on the data from single medium, however, the rich and complementary information carried by multiple media can be used to effectively enhance the topic detection performance. In this paper, we propose a flexible data fusion framework to detect topics that simultaneously exist in different mediums. The framework is based on a multi-modality graph (MMG), which is obtained by fusing two single-modality graphs together: a text graph and a visual graph. Each node of MMGrepresents a multi-modal data and the edge weight between two nodes jointly measures their content and upload-time similarities. Since the data about the same topic often have similar content and are usually uploaded in a similar period of time, they would naturally form a dense (namely, strongly connected) subgraph in MMG. Such dense subgraph is robust to noise and can be efficiently detected by pair-wise clustering methods. The experimental results on single-medium and cross-media datasets demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our method.
Restorative justice : a global overview of its functioning and effectiveness

Throughout most of human history restorative justice was the dominant criminal justice model, as is evident from the ancient Arab, Greek and Roman civilisations, all of which required compensation for the victim. Restorative justice was also the main focus of various aboriginal communities in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Historically, African societies also mostly focused on the victims of crime, and restitution and reconciliation was considered as crucial to redress the harm caused by crime. There has been a refocusing on restorative justice in Western countries since the early 1970s. Criminologists played a leading role in the modern revival of restorative justice by refocusing on the rights and needs of crime victims. It is also evident that South Africa is moving from a retributive to a restorative criminal justice system. It is, therefore, important to ensure that the judiciary becomes actively involved in the development of restorative justice in South Africa, in order to give effect to the government's shift from an offender-centred criminal justice system to a victim-centred restorative justice system as set out in the SA National Crime Prevention Strategy and other government reports as well as recent legal decisions and new draft legislation. This article reviews the objectives of restorative justice as well as the South African New Sentencing Framework Bill, the Child Justice Bill and the draft Sexual Offences Bill, all of which make provision for restorative justice.
Application and OS unconscious power manager for SoC systems

The paper1 describes a dynamic power management (DPM) strategy independent from application and operating system layers, but easily controllable by these layers. Challenges in defining an efficient power management policy include a relevant prediction mechanism of idle period of hardware components and the ability to wake-up components in sleep state such that time penalties induced by the power up operation do not affect application performance. We propose a power management technique based on a history graph built dynamically from the global functional states of the hardware components in the architecture. The history graph reflects the system functional states induced by the application tasks mapped and scheduled on hardware units whatever the operating system considered. The history graph captures correlations between functional states of hardware units and the timing in state evolution. Based on the history graph, power gating or clock gating is set to hardware units depending on the length of their predicted idle period. Wake-up events for power gated hardware units are also scheduled to limit impact of power up penalties. The policy has been analyzed through real practical benchmarks within the Synopsys Platform Architect framework.
Limited Association Between Perceived Control and Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients With Heart Failure

Background:Perceived control has been suggested as a modifiable factor associated with health-related quality of life (HRQOL). However, the relationship between perceived control and HRQOL has not been evaluated in patients with heart failure (HF). The purpose of this study was to determine whether perceived control independently predicts HRQOL in HF patients. Methods:A total of 423 HF patients were included. Hierarchical linear regression was performed to determine the independent association of perceived control to HRQOL after controlling for covariates. Results:Higher levels of perceived control were associated with better HRQOL in univariate analysis. However, this relationship was strongly attenuated after controlling for relevant demographic, clinical, and psychological factors; the variance in HRQOL explained by the addition of perceived control to this model was small (1.4%). Conclusions:We found only a weak relationship between perceived control and HRQOL when considered in the presence of demographic, clinical, and psychological factors.
Cardiac Metabolic Deregulation Induced by the Tyrosine Kinase Receptor Inhibitor Sunitinib is rescued by Endothelin Receptor Antagonism

The growing field of cardio-oncology addresses the side effects of cancer treatment on the cardiovascular system. Here, we explored the cardiotoxicity of the antiangiogenic therapy, sunitinib, in the mouse heart from a diagnostic and therapeutic perspective. We showed that sunitinib induces an anaerobic switch of cellular metabolism within the myocardium which is associated with the development of myocardial fibrosis and reduced left ventricular ejection fraction as demonstrated by echocardiography. The capacity of positron emission tomography with [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose to detect the changes in cardiac metabolism caused by sunitinib was dependent on fasting status and duration of treatment. Pan proteomic analysis in the myocardium showed that sunitinib induced (i) an early metabolic switch with enhanced glycolysis and reduced oxidative phosphorylation, and (ii) a metabolic failure to use glucose as energy substrate, similar to the insulin resistance found in type 2 diabetes. Co-administration of the endothelin receptor antagonist, macitentan, to sunitinib-treated animals prevented both metabolic defects, restored glucose uptake and cardiac function, and prevented myocardial fibrosis. These results support the endothelin system in mediating the cardiotoxic effects of sunitinib and endothelin receptor antagonism as a potential therapeutic approach to prevent cardiotoxicity. Furthermore, metabolic and functional imaging can monitor the cardiotoxic effects and the benefits of endothelin antagonism in a theranostic approach.
Surface Display and Bioactivity of Bombyx mori Acetylcholinesterase on Pichia pastoris

A Pichia pastoris (P. pastoris) cell surface display system of Bombyx mori acetylcholinesterase (BmAChE) was constructed and its bioactivity was studied. The modified Bombyx mori acetylcholinesterase gene (bmace) was fused with the anchor protein (AGα1) from Saccharomyces cerevisiae and transformed into P. pastoris strain GS115. The recombinant strain harboring the fusion gene bmace-AGα1 was induced to display BmAChE on the P. pastoris cell surface. Fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry assays revealed that the BmAChE was successfully displayed on the cell surface of P. pastoris GS115. The enzyme activity of the displayed BmAChE was detected by the Ellman method at 787.7 U/g (wet cell weight). In addition, bioactivity of the displayed BmAChE was verified by inhibition tests conducted with eserine, and with carbamate and organophosphorus pesticides. The displayed BmAChE had an IC50 of 4.17×10−8 M and was highly sensitive to eserine and five carbamate pesticides, as well as seven organophosphorus pesticides. Results suggest that the displayed BmAChE had good bioactivity.
A complex document information processing prototype

We developed a prototype for integrated retrieval and aggregation of diverse information contained in scanned paper documents. Such complex document information processing combines several forms of image processing together with textual/linguistic processing to enable effective analysis of complex document collections, a necessity for a wide range of applications. This is the first system to attempt integrated retrieval from complex documents; we report its current capabilities.
Saliency Detection Based on Multi-scale Image Features

In this paper, a simple method is proposed for detecting salient regions by utilizing muti-scale features at a superpixel-based level. To guarantee the accuracy of the detected region, we make use of superpixel to form a new measurement, instead of using the level of pixel. Majority of saliency models consider visual features such as orientation, color, intensity and the importance of visual features has not yet been fully explored. Here, we take texture feature into consideration in particular, using the gray level co-occurrence matrix(GLCM) as a texture descriptor. Specifically, a new local smoothing filter based on GLCM is proposed to smooth image and remove some simple texture before getting GLCM. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms some existing popular methods with full resolution and well-defined boundary.
TARGETING SYNAPTIC PATHOLOGY WITH A NOVEL AFFINITY MASS SPECTROMETRY APPROACH

We report a novel strategy for studying synaptic pathology by concurrently measuring levels of four SNARE complex proteins from individual brain tissue samples. This method combines affinity purification and mass spectrometry and can be applied directly for studies of SNARE complex proteins in multiple species or modified to target other key elements in neuronal function. We use the technique to demonstrate altered levels of presynaptic proteins in Alzheimer disease patients and prion-infected mice.
Role of the Protein Tyrosine Kinase Syk in Regulating Cell-Cell Adhesion and Motility in Breast Cancer Cells

The expression of the Syk protein tyrosine kinase in breast cancer cells is inversely correlated with invasive growth and metastasis. The expression of Syk inhibits cell motility while supporting the formation of cell clusters by enhancing cell-cell contacts and promoting the redistribution of the adhesion proteins cortactin and vinculin to these contacts. Syk associates physically with cortactin and catalyzes its phosphorylation on tyrosine. The clustering of integrins leads to the phosphorylation of Syk and of numerous cellular proteins in a manner dependent on the activity of the kinase and on the presence of tyrosine 342 located in the linker B region. The ability of Syk to participate in integrin-mediated protein tyrosine phosphorylation correlates well with its ability to inhibit cell motility. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(5):634–44)
The Effect of Pose on Facial Expression Recognition

Research into facial expression recognition has predominantly been based upon near frontal view data. However, a recent 3D facial expression database (BU-3DFE database) has allowed empirical investigation of facial expression recognition across pose. In this paper, we investigate the effects of pose from frontal to profile view on facial expression recognition. Experiments are carried out on 100 subjects with 5 yaw angles over 6 prototypical expressions. Expressions have 4 levels of intensity from subtle to exaggerated. We evaluate features such as local binary patterns (LBPs) as well as various extensions of LBPs. In addition, a novel approach to facial expression recognition is proposed using local gabor binary patterns (LGBPs). Multi class support vector machines (SVMs) are used for classification. We investigate the effects of image resolution and pose on facial expression classification using a variety of different features.
Mining Bilateral Patterns as Priori Knowledge for Efficient Service Composition

It is still a great challenge to make composite services that fulfill massive requirements from large community of customers. Service network (SN) approach has been put forward to deal with this issue in a cost-effective and agile way, i.e., a large number of services are connected as a customizable SN in terms of underlying semantics correlations, and when a new requirement arrives, the SN is customized to generate a composite service. It has been observed that there are similarities among requirements, and so are there among composite solutions of these requirements. In this paper, we identify bilateral patterns (i.e., requirement patterns and service patterns) from historical service composition records, and then establish the probabilistic mappings between them, consequently, a bilateral pattern based service network customization algorithm named BPSC is put forward to take full advantage of such priori knowledge to speed up the customization process. From experiments we find that, compared with traditional SN customization approaches such as WSPR, our BPSC can significantly improve the efficiency in most instances.
Adrift in the city : a comparative study of street children in Bogotá, Colombia, and Guatemala City

The life style of homeless children in two South American cities is reported in this chapter. The chapter describes a society within a society complete with mores, sanctions and values. The author's use of the term "street children" forces the reader to consider the dramatic and distruptive effect of poverty on children. The conclusions suggest a national policy review if the United State is to avoid a similar situation.
Capturing the superorganism: a formal theory of group adaptation

Adaptation is conventionally regarded as occurring at the level of the individual organism. However, in recent years there has been a revival of interest in the possibility for group adaptations and superorganisms. Here, we provide the first formal theory of group adaptation. In particular: (1) we clarify the distinction between group selection and group adaptation, framing the former in terms of gene frequency change and the latter in terms of optimization; (2) we capture the superorganism in the form of a ‘group as maximizing agent’ analogy that links an optimization program to a model of a group‐structured population; (3) we demonstrate that between‐group selection can lead to group adaptation, but only in rather special circumstances; (4) we provide formal support for the view that between‐group selection is the best definition for ‘group selection’; and (5) we reveal that mechanisms of conflict resolution such as policing cannot be regarded as group adaptations.
The Diameter of the Minimum Spanning Tree of a Complete Graph

Let $X_1,\ldots,X_{n\choose 2}$ be independent identically distributed weights for the edges of $K_n$. If $X_i \neq X_j$ for$ i \neq j$, then there exists a unique minimum weight spanning tree $T$ of $K_n$ with these edge weights. We show that the expected diameter of $T$ is $Θ (n^{1/3})$. This settles a question of [Frieze97].
LazyPIM: Efficient Support for Cache Coherence in Processing-in-Memory Architectures

Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures have seen an increase in popularity recently, as the high internal bandwidth available within 3D-stacked memory provides greater incentive to move some computation into the logic layer of the memory. To maintain program correctness, the portions of a program that are executed in memory must remain coherent with the portions of the program that continue to execute within the processor. Unfortunately, PIM architectures cannot use traditional approaches to cache coherence due to the high off-chip traffic consumed by coherence messages, which, as we illustrate in this work, can undo the benefits of PIM execution for many data-intensive applications. We propose LazyPIM, a new hardware cache coherence mechanism designed specifically for PIM. Prior approaches for coherence in PIM are ill-suited to applications that share a large amount of data between the processor and the PIM logic. LazyPIM uses a combination of speculative cache coherence and compressed coherence signatures to greatly reduce the overhead of keeping PIM coherent with the processor, even when a large amount of sharing exists.We find that LazyPIM improves average performance across a range of data-intensive PIM applications by 19.6%, reduces off-chip traffic by 30.9%, and reduces energy consumption by 18.0%, over the best prior approaches to PIM coherence.
When can a relay reduce end-to-end communication delay?

The impact of relaying on the latency of communication in a relay channel is studied. Both decode-forward (DF) and amplify-forward (AF) are considered, and are compared with the point-to-point (P2P) scheme which does not use the relay. The question as to whether DF and AF can decrease the latency of communicating a number of bits with a given reliability requirement is addressed. Latency expressions for the three schemes are derived. Although both DF and AF use a block-transmission structure which sends the information over multiple transmission blocks, they can both achieve latencies lower than P2P. Conditions under which this occurs are obtained. Interestingly, these conditions are more strict when compared to the conditions under which DF and AF achieve higher information-theoretic rates than P2P.
Overdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis and magnetic resonance imaging criteria

Retrospectively, we assessed the specificity of two proposed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) criteria for multiple sclerosis (MS) in patients suspected to have MS but who ultimately receive another diagnosis. Brain MRIs of 28 patients mixed with 28 MRIs of MS patients from the same cohort of 377 consecutively referred patients were scored by a neuroradiologist masked to the final diagnosis. The criteria for dissemination in space incorporated in the McDonald International Panel showed good specificity (89%). However, the more sensitive criteria proposed by a Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology resulted in a lower specificity (29%), indicating an increased risk of a false‐positive diagnosis. Ann Neurol 2005;58:781–783
Numerical Simulation on Performance of Disk MHD Generator in the Closed-Loop Experimental Facility

A time dependent two-dimensional numerical simulation has been carried out in order to clarify the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow behavior and performance of a disk MHD generator installed in a new closed-loop experimental facility at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The numerical investigation is not limited to the generator channel only, but also includes an inlet duct and a downstream 90deg-bend diffuser. A set of possible generator inlet-outlet pressure ratio (PR) was selected, and the influence on flow physics and generator performance was examined. Maximum enthalpy extraction (EE) ratio was obtained at high PR. In this case, an oblique shock wave appeared in the 90deg-bend diffuser for both non-MHD and MHD flow regimes. The EE, however, did not vary monotonically with the PR. Rather a local minimum point for the EE was observed at moderate PR. In this case, either an oblique shock wave or a normal shock wave would appear in the generator channel depending upon whether the flow was in the non-MHD or MHD regime. The results predicted in the present simulation are valuable and important for setting the working gas conditions and evaluating generator performance in the closed-loop power generation experiment
Efficient High Quality Rendering of Point Sampled Geometry

We propose a highly efficient hierarchical representation for point sampled geometry that automatically balances sampling density and point coordinate quantization. The representation is very compact with a memory consumption of far less than 2 bits per point position which does not depend on the quantization precision. We present an efficient rendering algorithm that exploits the hierarchical structure of the representation to perform fast 3D transformations and shading. The algorithm is extended to surface splatting which yields high quality anti-aliased and water tight surface renderings. Our pure software implementation renders up to 14 million Phong shaded and textured samples per second and about 4 million anti-aliased surface splats on a commodity PC. This is more than a factor 10 times faster than previous algorithms.
BigDog, the Rough-Terrain Quadruped Robot

Abstract Less than half the Earth's landmass is accessible to existing wheeled and tracked vehicles. But people and animals using their legs can go almost anywhere. Our mission at Boston Dynamics is to develop a new breed of rough-terrain robots that capture the mobility, autonomy and speed of living creatures. Such robots will travel in outdoor terrain that is too steep, rutted, rocky, wet, muddy, and snowy for conventional vehicles. They will travel in cities and in our homes, doing chores and providing care, where steps, stairways and household clutter limit the utility of wheeled vehicles. Robots meeting these goals will have terrain sensors, sophisticated computing and power systems, advanced actuators and dynamic controls. We will give a status report on BigDog, an example of such rough-terrain robots.
Indirect Fuzzy Adaptive Control for Active Shimmy Damping

In the context of aircraft, shimmy is an oscillatory phenomenon of the landing gear mainly due the tire dynamics and the landing gear structural dynamics. This phenomenon, which can result in severe structural damages of the landing gear, is here actively damped by an indirect fuzzy adaptive controller. The difficulties to model the ground/wheel interface require the use of an adaptive controller that can modify its behavior in accordance with the plant dynamics. Thus, the proposed controller uses a fuzzy system to estimate the plant dynamics, and then implements this estimate to generate the control law. Based on Lyapunov's theory, it is shown that the proposed adaptive control solution guarantees that the tracking errors will asymptotically converge to zero even if approximation errors appear in the estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed control law creates a realistic control input which properly damps the oscillations. This work is supported by the European DRESS project (Distributed and Redundant Electromechanical nose gear Steering System).