Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ads versus regular contents: Dissecting the web hosting ecosystem

Ads (advertisements) have become a common source of revenues for websites and transformed the web hosting ecosystem. This paper reports an extensive measurement-based study of web hosting with an explicit focus on differences in the hosting of ads versus regular contents. Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service and 22,040 open recursive DNS (Domain Name System) resolvers, we collect contents of top country-specific websites in 52 countries around the globe and characterize the hosting infrastructures. While we observe that ads employ more servers for broader load distribution, replication is local for ads and global for regular contents. Our results clearly show that transit ASes (Autonomous Systems), including the tier-1 networks, diversify their economic roles and prominently provide web hosting. A small number of ASes dominate heavily in the byte volume of hosted contents, with the top hosts being different for ads and regular contents. Compared to ASes and organizations, the distribution of hosting countries is even more heavily skewed, with the USA consistently taking the overwhelmingly dominant position. While ads have shorter response times, their download times are longer because websites are developed to serve requests for regular contents with a higher priority.
Using model checking to analyze static properties of declarative models

We show how static properties of declarative models can be efficiently analyzed in a symbolic model checker; in particular, we use Cadence SMV to analyze Alloy models by translating Alloy to SMV. The computational paths of the SMV models represent interpretations of the Alloy models. The produced SMV model satisfies its LTL specifications if and only if the original Alloy model is inconsistent with respect to its finite scopes; counterexamples produced by the model checker are valid instances of the Alloy model. Our experiments show that the translation of many frequently used constructs of Alloy to SMV results in optimized models such that their analysis in SMV is much faster than in the Alloy Analyzer. Model checking is faster than SAT solving for static problems when an interpretation can be eliminated by early decisions in the model checking search.
Natural Phyto-Bioactive Compounds for the Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes: Inflammation as a Target

Diabetes is a metabolic, endocrine disorder which is characterized by hyperglycemia and glucose intolerance due to insulin resistance. Extensive research has confirmed that inflammation is closely involved in the pathogenesis of diabetes and its complications. Patients with diabetes display typical features of an inflammatory process characterized by the presence of cytokines, immune cell infiltration, impaired function and tissue destruction. Numerous anti-diabetic drugs are often prescribed to diabetic patients, to reduce the risk of diabetes through modulation of inflammation. However, those anti-diabetic drugs are often not successful as a result of side effects; therefore, researchers are searching for efficient natural therapeutic targets with less or no side effects. Natural products’ derived bioactive molecules have been proven to improve insulin resistance and associated complications through suppression of inflammatory signaling pathways. In this review article, we described the extraction, isolation and identification of bioactive compounds and its molecular mechanisms in the prevention of diabetes associated complications.
Multi-channel piecewise selective averaging of cognitive evokedpotentials with variable

This work is about the development of an alternative way of averaging evoked potentials (EP) of cognitive activities. Since the main assumption of invariant waveforms time locked to the eliciting events does not hold for cognitive EPs, averaging results in distorted estimates. Our alternative selective averaging nds similar subsequences of xed length with variable latency which are common to all multi-channel EPs by transforming the multi-variate time series to discrete sequences via vector quantization and applying a sequence alignment algorithm. The method yields a signiicant improvement over common averaging in terms of noise at-tenuation and is shown to be valid by comparison with results for random data. Results for EP data obtained during a spatial imagination task are reported .
Ultrastructure of cilia and flagella – back to the future!

Eukaryotic cilia and flagella perform motility and sensory functions which are essential for cell survival in protozoans, and to organism development and homoeostasis in metazoans. Their ultrastructure has been studied from the early beginnings of electron microscopy, and these studies continue to contribute to much of our understanding about ciliary biology. In the light of the progress made in the visualization of cellular structures over the last decade, we revisit the ultrastructure of cilia and flagella. We briefly describe the typical features of a 9+2 axoneme before focusing extensively on the transition zone, the ciliary necklace, the singlet zone, the ciliary cap and the ciliary crown. We discuss how the singlet zone is linked to sensory and/or motile function, the contribution of the ciliary crown to ovocyte and mucosal propulsion, and the relationship between the ciliary cap and microtubule growth and shortening, and its relation to ciliary beat. We further examine the involvement of the transition zone/the ciliary necklace in axonemal stabilization, autotomy and as a diffusion barrier.
A MADS-Box Gene Necessary for Fruit Ripening at the Tomato Ripening-Inhibitor (Rin) Locus

Tomato plants harboring theripening-inhibitor (rin) mutation yield fruits that fail to ripen. Additionally, rin plants display enlarged sepals and loss of inflorescence determinacy. Positional cloning of the rin locus revealed two tandem MADS-box genes (LeMADS-RIN andLeMADS-MC), whose expression patterns suggested roles in fruit ripening and sepal development, respectively. Therin mutation alters expression of both genes. Gene repression and mutant complementation demonstrate thatLeMADS-RIN regulates ripening, whereasLeMADS-MC affects sepal development and inflorescence determinacy. LeMADS-RINdemonstrates an agriculturally important function of plant MADS-box genes and provides molecular insight into nonhormonal (developmental) regulation of ripening.
Mining Combined Causes

In recent years, many methods have been developed for detecting causal relationships in observational data. Some of them have the potential to tackle large data sets. However, these methods fail to discover a combined cause, i.e. a multi-factor cause consisting of two or more component variables which individually are not causes. A straightforward approach to uncovering a combined cause is to include both individual and combined variables in the causal discovery using existing methods, but this scheme is computationally infeasible due to the huge number of combined variables. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this practical causal discovery problem, i.e. mining combined causes in large data sets. The experiments with both synthetic and real world data sets show that the proposed method can obtain high-quality causal discoveries with a high computational efficiency.
Chondrogenic differentiation of clonal mouse embryonic cell line ATDC5 in vitro: differentiation-dependent gene expression of parathyroid hormone (PTH)/PTH-related peptide receptor

The regulatory role of parathyroid hormone (PTH)/PTH-related peptide (PTHrP) signaling has been implicated in embryonic skeletal development. Here, we studied chondrogenic differentiation of the mouse embryonal carcinoma-derived clonal cell line ATDC5 as a model of chondrogenesis in the early stages of endochondral bone development. ATDC5 cells retain the properties of chondroprogenitor cells, and rapidly proliferate in the presence of 5% FBS. Insulin (10 micrograms/ml) induced chondrogenic differentiation of the cells in a postconfluent phase through a cellular condensation process, resulting in the formation of cartilage nodules, as evidenced by expression of type II collagen and aggrecan genes. We found that differentiated cultures of ATDC5 cells abundantly expressed the high affinity receptor for PTH (Mr approximately 80 kD; Kd = 3.9 nM; 3.2 x 10(5) sites/cell). The receptors on differentiated cells were functionally active, as evidenced by a PTH-dependent activation of adenylate cyclase. Specific binding of PTH to cells markedly increased with the formation of cartilage nodules, while undifferentiated cells failed to show specific binding of PTH. Northern blot analysis indicated that expression of the PTH/PTHrP receptor gene became detectable at the early stage of chondrogenesis of ATDC5 cells, preceding induction of aggrecan gene expression. Expression of the PTH/PTHrP receptor gene was undetectable in undifferentiated cells. The level of PTH/PTHrP receptor mRNA was markedly elevated parallel to that of type II collagen mRNA. These lines of evidence suggest that the expression of functional PTH/PTHrP receptor is associated with the onset of chondrogenesis. In addition, activation of the receptor by exogenous PTH or PTHrP significantly interfered with cellular condensation and the subsequent formation of cartilage nodules, suggesting a novel site of PTHrP action.
An acoustic investigation of the [ATR] feature effect on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation

We report quantitative measurements of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation for neighbouring and non-neighbouring vowels that result from changes in the Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) feature. Native speakers of Southern British English produced utterances; we matched pairs that were identical except for a contrast of [+ATR] vs. [-ATR] on one "transmitter" vowel. From recordings, we computed an acoustic representation at the centres of the vowels, measuring the change in pronunciation associated with the change in [ATR] value. We observed a consistent coarticulatory effect two syllables after the transmitter when it was a low vowel (i.e. the /Λ/ vs. /a:/ and /ɒ/ vs. /ɔ:/ pairs), but little or no effect when the transmitter was a high vowel (i.e. the /i:/ vs. /I/ and /ʊ/ vs. /u:/ pairs). Interestingly, we observed more dramatic coarticulation on the next-nearest neighbour than on the vowel following the transmitter.
Recombinant immunotoxin engineered for low immunogenicity and antigenicity by identifying and silencing human B-cell epitopes

Recombinant immunotoxins (RITs) are hybrid proteins used to treat cancer. These proteins are composed of an Fv that reacts with cancer cells joined to a portion of Pseudomonas exotoxin A, which kills the cell. Because the toxin is a foreign protein, it can induce neutralizing antibodies and thereby limit the number of doses a patient can receive. We previously identified seven major mouse B-cell epitopes in the toxin, and subsequently silenced them using point mutations that converted large hydrophilic amino acids to alanine, yet retained full antitumor activity. Here we present results in which we identify and silence human B-cell epitopes in the RIT HA22. We obtained B cells from patients with antibodies to RITs, isolated the corresponding variable fragments (Fvs), and constructed a phage-display library containing Fvs that bind to the RITs. We then used alanine scanning mutagenesis to locate the epitopes. We found that human and mouse epitopes frequently overlap but are not identical. Most mutations that remove mouse epitopes did not remove human epitopes. Using the epitope information, we constructed a variant immunotoxin, HA22-LR-LO10, which has low reactivity with human antisera, yet has high cytotoxic and antitumor activity and can be given to mice at high doses without excess toxicity. The toxin portion of this RIT (LR-LO10) can be used with Fvs targeting other cancer antigens and is suitable for clinical development.
Five Years MIQE Guidelines: The Case of the Arabian Countries

The quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) has become a key molecular enabling technology with an immense range of research, clinical, forensic as well as diagnostic applications. Its relatively moderate instrumentation and reagent requirements have led to its adoption by numerous laboratories, including those located in the Arabian world, where qPCR, which targets DNA, and reverse transcription qPCR (RT-qPCR), which targets RNA, are widely used for region-specific biotechnology, agricultural and human genetic studies. However, it has become increasingly apparent that there are significant problems with both the quality of qPCR-based data as well as the transparency of reporting. This realisation led to the publication of the Minimum Information for Publication of Quantitative Real-Time PCR Experiments (MIQE) guidelines in 2009 and their more widespread adoption in the last couple of years. An analysis of the performance of biomedical research in the Arabian world between 2001–2005 suggests that the Arabian world is producing fewer biomedical publications of lower quality than other Middle Eastern countries. Hence we have analysed specifically the quality of RT-qPCR-based peer-reviewed papers published since 2009 from Arabian researchers using a bespoke iOS/Android app developed by one of the authors. Our results show that compliance with 15 essential MIQE criteria was low (median of 40%, range 0–93%) and few details on RNA quality controls (22% compliance), assays design (12%), RT strategies (32%), amplification efficiencies (30%) and the normalisation process (3%). These data indicate that one of the reasons for the poor performance of Arabian world biomedical research may be the low standard of any supporting qPCR experiments and identify which aspects of qPCR experiments require significant improvements.
Generating Elliptic Coordination

In this paper, we focus on the task of generating elliptic sentences. We extract from the data provided by the Surface Realisation (SR) Task 2398 input whose corresponding output sentence contain an ellipsis. We show that 9\% of the data contains an ellipsis and that both coverage and BLEU score markedly decrease for elliptic input (from 82.3% coverage for non-elliptic sentences to 65.3% for elliptic sentences and from 0.60 BLEU score to 0.47). We argue that elided material should be represented using phonetically empty nodes and we introduce a set of rewrite rules which permits adding these empty categories to the SR data. Finally, we evaluate an existing surface realiser on the resulting dataset. We show that, after rewriting, the generator achieves a coverage of 76% and a BLEU score of 0.74 on the elliptical data.
NWU-EECS-1006 March 26 , 2010 Characterizing and Modeling User Activity on Smartphones

We present a comprehensive analysis of real smartphone usage during a 6-month study, involving 25 users, and one specific smartphone, the Android G1. The goal of our work is to study the high-level characteristics of smartphone usage, and to understand the implications on optimizing smartphones, and their networks. We present 11 findings that cover general usage behavior, interaction with the battery, power consumption, network activity, frequently-run applications, and modeling usage states. We then discuss the implications of these findings on optimizing and/or modeling smartphones and their networks. Some of our findings include the following: (1) we show that battery management is a significant part of the user experience, with near daily charging and frequent low battery indicators; (2) we characterize the system-level power consumption to show that the screen and CPU are two of the most power hungry components on a smartphone; (3) we characterize EDGE and wifi session, providing insight into developing models for smartphone networks; and (4) we demonstrate that real user activity can be clustered to yield a small number of machine states, and state transitions, that can form the basis for modeling smartphone devices.
A review on improving traffic flow using cooperative adaptive cruise control system

The ever-increasing demand of vehicular mobility in today's life over loads the existing road transportation infrastructure and resources, for which a robust solution in the near future lies in effective utilization of currently available means of road transportation and infrastructure. For this purpose, development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies that contribute to improved traffic flow stability, throughput, better utilization of infrastructure and safety is needed. In today's traffic, to achieve the safe inter-vehicle distance, avoid congestion and improve safety, the limited human perception of traffic conditions and human reaction characteristics constrain should be analysed. In addition, erroneous human driving conditions may generate shockwaves in addition which causes traffic flow instabilities. In this paper to achieve regulated inter-vehicle distance and improved throughput, we consider Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) system, for vehicle string. Information of individual vehicle is exchange between vehicles through wireless communication in addition can give better performance. By introducing vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to roadside unit (V2R) communications, the vehicle gets information not only from its preceding and following vehicle but also from the vehicles in front of the preceding one and following one.
Effects of Surface Treatment on Fretting Fatigue Performance of Ti-6 Al-4 V Mr

The fretting fatigue performance of Ti-6Al-4V after isothermal exposure was explored in test coupons in low plasticity burnished (LPB), shot peened (SP) and electropolished (ELP) baseline conditions. The thermal stability of the compressive residual stress fields produced by SP and LPB was investigated. In the current study, fretting fatigue data and fractography are presented along with in-depth residual stress profiles, both before and after the isothermal exposure. Surface roughness data for each of the three surface conditions are reported.
Functional Neuroimaging: A Physiological Perspective

Metabolic physiology and functional neuroimaging have played important and complementary roles over the past two decades. In particular, investigations of the mechanisms underlying functional neuroimaging signals have produced fundamental new insights into hemodynamic and metabolic regulation. However, controversies were also raised as regards the metabolic pathways (oxidative vs. non-oxidative) for meeting the energy demand and driving the increases in cerebral blood flow (CBF) during brain activation. In a recent study, with the concurrent functional MRI-MRS measurements, we found that task-evoked energy demand was predominately met through oxidative metabolism (approximately 98%), despite a small increase in cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (12–17%). In addition, the task-induced increases in CBF were most likely mediated by anaerobic glycolysis rather than oxygen demand. These observations and others from functional neuroimaging support the activation-induced neuron-astrocyte interactions portrayed by the astrocyte-neuron lactate shuttle model. The concurrent developments of neuroimaging methods and metabolic physiology will also pave the way for the future investigation of cerebral hemodynamics and metabolism in disease states.
Learning to Speed Up MAP Decoding with Column Generation

In this paper, we show how the connections between max-product message passing for max-product and linear programming relaxations allow for a more efficient exact algorithm for the MAP problem. Our proposed algorithm uses column generation to pass messages only on a small subset of the possible assignments to each variable, while guaranteeing to find the exact solution. This algorithm is three times faster than Viterbi decoding for part-of-speech tagging on WSJ data and equivalently fast as beam search with a beam of size two while being exact. The empirical performance of column generation depends on how quickly we can rule out entire sets of assignments to the edges of the chain, which is done by bounding the contribution of the pairwise factors to the score of the solution. This provides an opportunity at the intersection of inference and learning: at training time, we can regularize the model in a way that makes inference faster without changing its structure.
Patterns of native and exotic vascular plant richness along an elevational gradient from sea level to the summit of the Appalachian Mountains, U.S.A

Abstract We used floristic studies from the state of North Carolina to compare the patterns of total, native and exotic plant species richness from sea level (Atlantic coast) to the summit of the Appalachian Mountains. Few studies have investigated how patterns of native and exotic species richness differ along environmental gradients, and these studies have yielded contrasting results. We compare our results with those few published studies, and demonstrate that there is a need for future studies examining exotic richness along gradients. We modeled the effects of size of study area, year of study, and elevation on species richness using a dataset of sixty-eight floristic studies. Native and exotic species richness showed a positive relationship with area and year. Exotic species showed a steeper slope than native species for the species-area relationship. Richness of both groups was positively but weakly related to year of study. After accounting for area and year, native species displayed a hump-shaped pattern along the elevational gradient. Exotic species richness was weakly related to elevation, which was not a significant variable in the model. This contrasts with the few previous studies that have examined exotic richness patterns along elevational gradients that have found either a strong linear decline, or a strong hump-shaped pattern. Both native and exotic species showed high variation in richness at elevations below 400 m. We conclude that different processes may govern native and exotic plant richness patterns and that exotic richness patterns along gradients may in fact be idiosyncratic due to factors such as disturbance history.
Jambalaya: Interactive visualization to enhance ontology authoring and knowledge acquisition in Protégé

This paper describes the integration of an interactive visualization user interface with a knowledge management tool called Protege. Protege is a general-purpose tool that allows domain experts to build knowledge-based systems by creating and modifying reusable ontologies and problem-solving methods, and by instantiating ontologies to construct knowledge bases. The SHriMP (Simple Hierarchical Multi-Perspective) visualization technique was designed to enhance how people browse, explore and interact with complex information spaces. Although SHriMP is information independent, its primary use to date has been for visualizing and documenting software programs. The paper describes how we have applied software visualization techniques to more general knowledge domains. It is hoped that the integrated environment (called Jambalaya) will result in an easier to use and more powerful environment to support ontology evolution and knowledge acquisition. An example scenario of how Jambalaya can be applied to knowledge acquisition is provided.
Effect of corporate compensation design on organizational performance

Through 800 valid questionnaires collected from the directors, managers and staff of 600 Taiwanese businesses in Taicang City, a representative mainland Chinese city densely invested in by Taiwanese businessmen, the study was to detect the relations between the three variables of corporate compensation design (the independent variable), mental motivation (the adjustment variable) and organizational performance (the dependent variable). Moreover, the effect of mental motivation on the relation between corporate compensation design and organizational performance was further studied and findings are discussed.