Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structure of the bacterial cell division determinant GpsB and its interaction with penicillin‐binding proteins

Each bacterium has to co‐ordinate its growth with division to ensure genetic stability of the population. Consequently, cell division and growth are tightly regulated phenomena, albeit different bacteria utilise one of several alternative regulatory mechanisms to maintain control. Here we consider GpsB, which is linked to cell growth and division in Gram‐positive bacteria. ΔgpsB mutants of the human pathogen Listeria monocytogenes show severe lysis, division and growth defects due to distortions of cell wall biosynthesis. Consistent with this premise, GpsB interacts both in vitro and in vivo with the major bi‐functional penicillin‐binding protein. We solved the crystal structure of GpsB and the interaction interfaces in both proteins are identified and validated. The inactivation of gpsB results in strongly attenuated virulence in animal experiments, comparable in degree to classical listerial virulence factor mutants. Therefore, GpsB is essential for in vitro and in vivo growth of a highly virulent food‐borne pathogen, suggesting that GpsB could be a target for the future design of novel antibacterials.
Social performance reveals unexpected vocal competency in young songbirds

Vocal ontogeny in songbirds provides a good model for understanding how complex motor behavior, including speech, is learned. For birdsong, as for other motor learning, it has generally been assumed that a subject's motor output at any point during learning represents what the subject has learned to produce by that time. Here, we show, however, that juvenile zebra finches partway through song learning, singing immature song, are capable of producing song with much more mature properties, depending on the behavioral context. In these birds, we were able to elicit courtship (female-directed) song, which young birds normally sing infrequently, and to compare it with the alone or “undirected” song (Undir) predominantly produced during learning as well as with the same bird's subsequent adult song. We found that the juvenile courtship song was much less variable than the immature Undir and as stereotyped as the adult song produced after a further month of practice. More strikingly, the juvenile courtship song was also acoustically much more similar than Undir to the adult song. This finding demonstrates that the Undir that juvenile birds usually produce underestimates the extent of learning and that song structure is learned faster than previously thought. Moreover, the rapid improvement in song quality in response to external social cues supports the idea that courtship singing is a state of motor “performance,” in which the bird selects the best variants of the song learned during singing alone, and suggests that such performance states can reveal unappreciated progression of learning.
THE IMPLICATION OF THE FIRST PRENATAL DIAGNOSIS FOR HUNTINGTON DISEASE IN BULGARIA AFTER PREDICTIVE TESTING

Summary. The issue of carrier testing for Huntington's disease (HD) gene is controversial. Careful counselling and follow-up is needed if asymptomatic family members at risk are tested. Though test results are "black or white" in >99% of cases, their interpretation may be quite problematic and difficult in individual cases. Although the identification of the HD gene mutation has facilitated predictive testing, there is no treatment available to slow down or alter the disease progression. Therefore, carrier testing is associated with numerous emotional, practical and ethical concerns. Appropriate genetic counselling and support is necessary in such cases. We present our experience in predictive testing of HD, underpinning essential steps of the testing procedure: evaluation of the motives, psychological assessment before and after the tests and consistent support of the patient/couple during the entire process as well as of their subsequent reproductive decisions.
Broadcast Technology

W e developed a 3D archive system for Japanese traditional performing arts. The system generates sequences of 3D actor models of the performances from multi-view video by using a graph-cuts algorithm and stores them with CG background models and related information. The system can show a scene from any viewpoint as follows; the 3D actor model is integrated with the background model and the integrated model is projected to a viewpoint that the user indicates with a viewpoint controller. A challenge of generating the actor models is how to reconstruct thin or slender parts. Japanese traditional costumes for performances include slender parts such as long sleeves, fans and strings that may be manipulated during the performance. The graph-cuts algorithm is a powerful 3D reconstruction tool but it tends to cut off those parts because it uses an energy-minimization process. Hence, the search for a way to reconstruct such parts is important for us to preserve these arts for future generations. We therefore devised an adaptive erosion method that works on the visual hull and applied it to the graph-cuts algorithm to extract interior nodes in the thin parts and to prevent the thin parts from being cut off. Another tendency of the reconstruction method using the graph-cuts algorithm is over-shrinkage of the reconstructed models. This arises because the energy can also be reduced by cutting inside the true surface. To avoid this tendency, we applied a silhouette-rim constraint defined by the number of the silhouette-rims passing through each node. By applying the adaptive erosion process and the silhouette-rim constraint, we succeeded in constructing a virtual performance with costumes including thin parts. This paper presents the results of the 3D reconstruction using the proposed method and some outputs of the 3D archive system.
Language dispute and social change in new multilingual institutions in Chaco, Argentina

Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) programmes in Latin America pose interesting questions for sociolinguistics, since their implementation interrogates the link between language and the nation resulting from the emergence of nation-states, but also from processes of decolonization. In the case of Argentina, a new legal framework and the recent implementation of new public policies at national and provincial levels have caused key social and linguistic transformations in educational institutions in indigenous contexts. This paper aims to show some current transformations in multilingual management in Chaco's educational institutions. To do this, I consider the case of public schools, traditionally monolingual in Spanish, to which new actors are incorporated, i.e. Wichi bilingual teachers. Their presence at school and their linguistic practices illustrate the tensions between different language ideologies that coexist today in the Argentinean educational system. As I try to show, bilingualism – as an ideological sign and as symbolic capital – and bilingual practices constitute a contested terrain that can be explored through a sociolinguistic ethnography.
Enhancing self-reflection with wearable sensors

Advances in ubiquitous technologies have changed the way humans interact with the world around them. Technology has the power not only to inform and perform but also to further peoples' experiences of the world. It has enhanced the methodological approaches within the CHI research realm in terms of data gathering (e.g. via wearable sensors) and sharing (e.g. via self-reflection methods). While such methodologies have been mainly adopted in isolation, exploring the implications and the synergy of them has yet to be fully explored. This workshop brings together a multidisciplinary group of researchers to explore and experience the use of wearable sensors with self-reflection as a multi-method approach to conduct research and fully experience the world on-the-go.
Julius Caesar Versus White Australia: The Painted Savages of Britain, Race, and the Use of History

This paper examines the use of history by critics of the ‘White Australia’ policy, and of earlier colonial restrictions, revealing a tradition of resistance to racialism in the nineteenth century that was founded upon the description of the ancient British provided by Julius Caesar in his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. A finding of this paper is that during the nineteenth century this description was a powerful and continually invoked historical reference used by those who questioned the assumption of ‘white’ superiority. The various uses of this imagery to combat slavery, racial exclusion and racial prejudice make this an important topic for understanding the contested racial discourses of the nineteenth century. It is argued that the use of this description was an important precursor to ‘cultural relativism’ which in the twentieth century replaced the previously accepted ideas of biological determinism to account for group differences. This article has been peer-reviewed.
Continuous Shape Transformation and Metrics on Shapes

A natural approach to defining continuous change of shape is in terms of a metric that measures the difference between two regions. We consider four such metrics over regions: the Hausdorff distance, the dual-Hausdorff distance, the area of the symmetric difference, and the optimal-homeomorphism metric. Each of these gives a different criterion for continuous change. We establish qualitative properties of all of these; in particular, the continuity of basic functions such as union, intersection, set difference, area, distance, and the boundary function; the transition graph between RCC relations (Randell, Cui, and Cohn, 1992). We discuss the physical significance of these different criteria. We also show that the history-based definition of continuity proposed by Muller (1998) is equivalent to continuity with respect to the Hausdorff distance. An examination of the difference between the transition rules that we have found for the Hausdorff distance and the transition theorems that Muller derives leads to the conclusion that Muller’s analysis of state transitions is not adequate. We propose an alternative characterization of transitions in Muller’s first-order language over histories.
Automatic property visualization for material survey support

Engineers in the semiconductor domain are spending significant time searching for materials with certain properties, such as carrier mobility and bandgap values within certain ranges, or to keep informed about newly discovered materials with desirable properties. Since these searches are not anchored in keywords, the usual information retrieval tools are of limited utility. In this paper, we propose a novel system that enables engineers to more efficiently conduct bibliographic surveys in the domain of semiconductor device materials. The system uses large-scale statistical learning and inference to extract relations between materials and their physical properties from text, and visualizes them.
Barcelona Economics Working Paper Series Dynamic Price Competition with Fixed Capacities Dynamic Price Competition with Fixed Capacities

Many revenue management (RM) industries are characterized by (a) fixed capacities in the short term (e.g., hotel rooms, seats on an airline flight), (b) homogeneous products (e.g., two airline flights between the same cities at similar times), and (c) customer purchasing decisions largely influenced by price. Competition in these industries is also very high even with just two or three direct competitors in a market. However, RM competition is not well understood and practically all known implementations of RM software and most published models of RM do not explicitly model competition. For this reason, there has been considerable recent interest and research activity to understand RM competition. In this paper we study price competition for an oligopoly in a dynamic setting, where each of the sellers has a fixed number of units available for sale over a fixed number of periods. Demand is stochastic, and depending on how it evolves, sellers may change their prices at any time. This reflects the fact that firms constantly, and almost costlessly, change their prices (alternately, allocations at a price in quantity-based RM), reacting either to updates in their estimates of market demand, competitor prices, or inventory levels. We first prove existence of a unique subgame-perfect equilibrium for a duopoly. In equilibrium, in each state sellers engage in Bertrand competition, so that the seller with the lowest reservation value ends up selling a unit at a price that is equal to the equilibrium reservation value of the competitor. This structure hence extends the marginal-value concept of bid-price control, used in many RM implementations, to a competitive model. In addition, we show that the seller with the lowest capacity sells all its units first. Furthermore, we extend the results transparently to n firms and perform a number of numerical comparative statics exploiting the uniqueness of the subgame-perfect equilibrium.
Spontaneous phase transfer of nanoparticulate metals from organic to aqueous media.

4-dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP) is the answer to the quest for an efficient transfer of metallic nanoparticles from organic to aqueous solutions. The picture shows the transfer of gold nanoparticles from toluene to water by the addition of DMAP (0.1 M, pH 10.5). This method enables the generation of high concentrations of nanoparticles with better monodispersity than those commonly prepared in water.
Extending Amdahl’s Law for Heterogeneous Multicore Processor with Consideration of the Overhead of Data Preparation

We extend Amdahl's law by considering the overhead of data preparation (ODP) for multicore systems, and apply it to three “traditional” multicore system scenarios (homogeneous symmetric multicore, asymmetric multicore, and dynamic multicore) and two new scenarios (heterogeneous CPU-GPU multicore and dynamic CPU-GPU multicore). It demonstrates that potential innovations in heterogeneous system architecture are indispensable to decrease ODP.
A controlled trial of short-term group treatment for borderline personality disorder

This paper describes a group treatment program that was developed and tested in a treatment comparison trial with patients who met criteria for the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The specific structure, techniques, and therapeutic focus of the group method are described. The design of the group method reflects an integration of diagnostic and etiologic factors specific to the borderline disorder. It also focuses on identifying therapist variables that are critical in the management of this challenging disorder. The process of change within the context of group interactions is illustrated.
Tactile prosthetics in WiseSkin

The use of prosthetic hands is limited in part by the lack of sensory feedback to the wearer. In order to provide sensory feedback, an adequate number of sensors must be integrated with the prosthesis. The WiseSkin project targets the use of artificial skin embedding ultra-low power wireless sensor nodes. This presentation provides an overview of the WiseSkin project and the current status of the developments.
Shared Crowds: A Token-Ring Approach to Hide the Receiver

Because of the intensive usage of the internet and services provided over the world wide web, the privacy of the users is threatened by various attacks. This paper shows how to build a protocol for anonymous data transmission, with the primary focus on hiding the identity of the receiver (receiver anonymity), using multi path transmission and secret sharing. This protocol extends the crowds system by Reiter and Rubin, which only weakly hides the identity of the receiver. Due to the use of a circular channel topology the receiver is hidden even if timing attacks are mounted. Additionally this protocol gives the participating nodes the possibility to detect active attacks during the channel setup phase. Another positive aspect is the ability to handle some kind of node failures by repairing the virtual channel.
Sensitivity of Newborn Auditory Cortex to the Temporal Structure of Sounds

Understanding the rapidly developing building blocks of speech perception in infancy requires a close look at the auditory prerequisites for speech sound processing. Pioneering studies have demonstrated that hemispheric specializations for language processing are already present in early infancy. However, whether these computational asymmetries can be considered a function of linguistic attributes or a consequence of basic temporal signal properties is under debate. Several studies in adults link hemispheric specialization for certain aspects of speech perception to an asymmetry in cortical tuning and reveal that the auditory cortices are differentially sensitive to spectrotemporal features of speech. Applying concurrent electrophysiological (EEG) and hemodynamic (near-infrared spectroscopy) recording to newborn infants listening to temporally structured nonspeech signals, we provide evidence that newborns process nonlinguistic acoustic stimuli that share critical temporal features with language in a differential manner. The newborn brain preferentially processes temporal modulations especially relevant for phoneme perception. In line with multi-time-resolution conceptions, modulations on the time scale of phonemes elicit strong bilateral cortical responses. Our data furthermore suggest that responses to slow acoustic modulations are lateralized to the right hemisphere. That is, the newborn auditory cortex is sensitive to the temporal structure of the auditory input and shows an emerging tendency for functional asymmetry. Hence, our findings support the hypothesis that development of speech perception is linked to basic capacities in auditory processing. From birth, the brain is tuned to critical temporal properties of linguistic signals to facilitate one of the major needs of humans: to communicate.
Semi-Automatic Checklist Quality Assessment of Natural Language Requirements for Space Applications

Problems with the specification of software requirements documents are a common cause of software defects. In the space applications domain, such defects are very costly, especially when detected after deployment in the field. It is imperative to ensure that software requirements are well written to avoid the introduction of these defects. The quality of software requirements is frequently assessed via checklists, based on standards for space application software, and on problems found in previous projects. Given the importance of quality assessment, and the fact that it is manually performed by domain experts, we propose to develop a semi-automatic, natural language processing tool, to diminish the reviewer's effort in the assessment, and to reduce errors in this process.
Race, Ethnicity, and Determinate Sentencing

A study of 4729 sentences handed out during the first year of determinate sentencing in California shows subtle differences in the sentencing of Whites, Blacks, and Chicanos. As expected, main effects of race/ethnicity are not found. However, the type of offense, mode of disposition, and the defendant's prior record do affect sentencing differently, even with determinate sentencing, depending on the defendant's race/ethnicity. The detrimental effect of a prior record for Chicanos is especially interesting as it can be invoked legally as a sentence enhancement. The findings reported here demonstrate that Chicanos constitute a separate group, distinct from both Blacks and Whites, and must be treated accordingly in criminological research. So doing clarifies many of the inconsistencies in prior sentencing research.
Parcels v0.9: prototyping a Lagrangian Ocean Analysis framework for the petascale age

As Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs) move into the petascale age, where the output from global high-resolution model runs can be of the order of hundreds of terabytes in size, tools to analyse the output of these models will need to scale up too. Lagrangian Ocean Analysis, where virtual particles are tracked through hydrodynamic fields, is an increasingly popular way to analyse OGCM output, by mapping pathways and connectivity of biotic and abiotic particulates. However, the current software stack of Lagrangian Ocean Analysis codes is not dynamic enough to cope with the increasing complexity, scale and need for customisation of use-cases. Furthermore, most community codes are developed for stand-alone use, making it a nontrivial task to integrate virtual particles at runtime of the OGCM. Here, we introduce the new Parcels code, which was designed from the ground up to be sufficiently scalable to cope with petascale computing. We highlight its API design that combines flexibility and customisation with the ability to optimise for HPC workflows, following the paradigm of domain-specific languages. Parcels is primarily written in Python, utilising the wide range of tools available in the scientific Python ecosystem, while generating low-level C-code and using Just-In-Time compilation for performance-critical computation. We show a worked-out example of its API, and validate the accuracy of the code against seven idealised test cases. This version 0.9 of Parcels is focussed on laying out the API, with future work concentrating on optimisation, efficiency and at-runtime coupling with OGCMs.
Distance Education Trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration

Current trends in the field of distance education indicate a shift in pedagogical perspectives and theoretical frameworks, with student interaction at the heart of learner‐centered constructivist environments. The purpose of this article is to explore the benefits of using emerging technology tools such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts to foster student interaction in online learning. It also reviews social software applications such as Writeboard™, InstaColl™, and Imeem™. Although emerging technologies offer a vast range of opportunities for promoting collaboration in both synchronous and asynchronous learning environments, distance education programs around the globe face challenges that may limit or deter implementation of these technologies. This article probes the influence of technology on theory and the possible implications this influence affords.