Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Different plasma levels of interleukins and chemokines: comparison between children and adults with AIDS in China.

BACKGROUND The immunological differences between children and adults with AIDS in China are not well documented. Th1/Th2 cytokines and chemokines are two types of immune factors intimately involved in disease progression of HIV-1 infection. This study aimed to identify changes in plasma levels of Th1/Th2 cytokines inerleukin (IL)-18, IL-16, IL-10 and chemokines regulated on activation, normal T cell expressed and secreted (RANTES), stromal cell-derived factor-1 (SDF-1) and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) in HIV-1-infected children and adults in China. METHODS Seventy-five children with AIDS and 35 adult AIDS patients were recruited and clinical data were collected. CD4(+) T lymphocyte counts were measured by flow cytometery and plasma HIV RNA levels were measured by quantitative RT-PCR. Plasma levels of IL-18, IL-10, IL-16, RANTES, MCP-1, SDF-1alpha and SDF-1beta were quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The levels of beta2-microglobulin (beta2-MG) and soluble Fas (sFas) were measured to validate the level of humoral and cellular immune activation. RESULTS The mean levels of all cytokines in pediatric and adult AIDS patients were significantly higher than in their healthy controls (P < 0.01). The mean levels of these cytokines were higher in pediatric patients than in adult patients (P < 0.05, except for SDF-1alpha and beta2-MG). Some of the cytokine levels in patients younger than 6 years old was higher than in older children and adults with AIDS (IL-10, IL-18, SDF-1alpha, MCP, RANTES and sFas, P < 0.05). Levels of IL-18, IL-10, RANTES and beta2-MG of pediatric patients increased as the levels of viral load increased (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Abnormal immune activation can be measured in Chinese pediatric and adult patients with AIDS, and is higher in children than in adult patients. The cytokines levels coincide with disease progression of AIDS, but have no direct relationship with total CD4(+) T cell count.
Investigation of naturalistic sleep/wake behaviour in myalgic encephaloyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome

Sleep dysfunction is a prominent feature in the subjective experience of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). Although studies using polysomonography have identified at least one abnormal sleep characteristic in individuals with ME/CFS, no standard abnormalities in sleep have been identified. At the time of writing, only one published study had compared actigraphic measures of sleep between ME/CFS and controls, with no differences found. The aim of this study was to compare sleep parameters in people with and without ME/CFS using self-report and actigraphy.
Using Reflection to Develop Higher Order Processes.

The ability to think critically is an important trait of all members of society. With today's multinational, multicultural, complex issues, citizens must be able to sift through large amounts of various data to make intelligent decisions. According to Leibowitz (1997) " complex thinking, communication and collaboration will be among the essential process areas for the world as we will know it " (p. 50). Higher education must provide the intellectual training for its students to participate in this world. Purpose The main purpose of this study was to look at how we used specific writing assignments in our courses to encourage metacognitive reflection in order to increase the learning that takes place. This study also aimed to aid in the development of higher order processing skills through the development of student reflection. We have focused on Marzano's (2001) three systems of knowledge processing: self-system thinking, metacognition and cognitive system. The cognitive system is subdivided into retrieval, comprehension, analysis, and knowledge utilization. Theoretical Framework Vygotsky (1978) noted that for " the adolescent, to recall means to think " (p.51). We contend that for college students thinking should also mean reflection. According to Mezirow
Proteolysis and its regulation at the surface of Streptococcus pyogenes

Pathogenic bacteria often produce proteinases that are believed to be involved in virulence. Moreover, several host defence systems depend on proteolysis, demonstrating that proteolysis and its regulation play an important role during bacterial infections. Here, we discuss how proteolytical events are regulated at the surface of Streptococcus pyogenes during infection with this important human pathogen. ◊Streptococcus pyogenes produces proteinases, and host protein‐ases are produced and released as a result of the infection. Streptococcus pyogenes also recruits host proteinase inhibitors to its surface, suggesting that proteolysis is tightly regulated at the bacterial surface. We propose that the initial phase of a S. pyogenes infection is characterized by inhibition of proteolysis and complement activity at the bacterial surface. This is achieved mainly through binding of host proteinase inhibitors and complement regulatory proteins to bacterial surface proteins. In a later phase of the infection, massive proteolytic activity will release bacterial surface proteins and degrade human tissues, thus facilitating bacterial spread. These proteolytic events are regulated both temporally and spatially, and should influence virulence and the outcome of S. pyogenes infections.
A Tool for the Analysis of Social Networks in Collaborative Software Development

In this article, we present a tool that is designed to investigate the collaboration network between actors in software development groups. Our approach uses data derived from the version control system SVN (subversion) to retrieve the collaboration structures using an elaborate refinement process. The software `SVN Network Analysis Tool' (SVNNAT) aims to reveal the strengths and properties of collaboration ties between the developers in order to analyze their productivity and their quality of work in a given constellation of a software development network. In contrast to an earlier version of SVNNAT, our current approach accounts for the specific structures of programming languages in software code to separate technical artifacts from the information about the actors' collaboration in the development network. The result of the evaluation process is a social network of software developers that can be analyzed using typical indicators of topology properties like betweenness, closeness, and degree centralization. In a further step such network analysis can be used to propose an efficient network structure for developers of newly designed software projects.
Requirements on the Use of Goal-Directed Imitation for Self-Adaptation

Imitation is a powerful mechanism in human society, and has proven its usefulness in machine learning. This paper describes the notion of goal-directed imitation and its possible role in realizing self-adaptive systems. The conditions for its application are analyzed. We illustrate the working of imitation in self-adaptation by means of a small example
Dynamic on-line object update in the Grumps system

This paper describes the Grumps approach to the on-line upgrading of objects in a distributed system. This is supported by three main, well-known ideas: core code abstractions are defined in terms of Java interfaces and not classes; as many decisions as possible are delayed until run-time; and object containers are used to manage groups of objects at run-time. The advantage of the first idea is that it introduces a level of indirection in between what an object does (in terms of its interface) and how that is accomplished (in terms of its class). The advantage of the second idea is that it does not force the programmer to make decisions at compile-time that may be hard to change later; they can change their mind and easily alter the system's behaviour at run-time. The use of the third idea allows objects to be grouped together and the container can act as a representative for or abstraction over the contained objects. The major Grumps abstractions are described, an example object upgrade is presented and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are discussed.
Grammar Comparison Study for Translational Equivalence Modeling and Statistical Machine Translation

This paper presents a general platform, namely synchronous tree sequence substitution grammar (STSSG), for the grammar comparison study in Translational Equivalence Modeling (TEM) and Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Under the STSSG platform, we compare the expressive abilities of various grammars through synchronous parsing and a real translation platform on a variety of Chinese-English bilingual corpora. Experimental results show that the STSSG is able to better explain the data in parallel corpora than other grammars. Our study further finds that the complexity of structure divergence is much higher than suggested in literature, which imposes a big challenge to syntactic transformation-based SMT.
Using metaphors in restoring nature

There has recently been growing interest in the role of metaphors in environmentalism and nature conservation. Metaphors not only structure how we perceive and think but also how we should act. The metaphor of nature as a book provokes a different attitude and kind of nature management than the metaphor of nature as a machine, an organism, or a network. This article explores four clusters of metaphors that are frequently used in framing ecological restoration: metaphors from the domains of engineering and cybernetics; art and aesthetics; medicine and health care; and geography. The article argues that these metaphors, like all metaphors, are restricted in range and relevance, and that we should adopt a multiple vision on metaphor. The adoption and development of such a multiple vision will facilitate communication and cooperation across the boundaries that separate different kinds of nature management and groups of experts and other stakeholders.
Impact of group development knowledge on students' perceived confidence and importance of group work skills through a service-learning project

This study explored the impact of emphasis on the group development process, as developed by Tuckman and Jensen (1977), on the perceived importance of and confidence in group work skills, as well as students’ perception of group work use in the collegiate classroom. The purposive sample utilized in this study included 33 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory leadership and service course at a southern, land-grant institution. Knowledge of the group development process enhanced students’ perceived importance and confidence in group work skills, and positively impacted students’ perception of group work in the college classroom. The importance of group work skills continues to be reflective of the demand from employers; educators must continue to develop these transferable skills in today’s students. INDEX WORDS: Group Work Skills, Group Perception, Leadership, Student Perception, Group Projects, Service Learning, Career Skills, Core Group Work Skills Inventory IMPACT OF GROUP DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE ON STUDENTS’ PERCEIVED CONFIDENCE AND IMPORTANCE OF GROUP WORK SKILLS THROUGH A SERVICELEARNING PROJECT
ICA and SOM in text document analysis

In this study we show experimental results on using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) in document analysis. Our documents are segments of spoken dialogues carried out over the telephone in a customer service, transcribed into text. The task is to analyze the topics of the discussions, and to group the discussions into meaningful subsets. The quality of the grouping is studied by comparing to a manual topical classification of the documents.
Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis

The Internet is composed of many independent autonomous systems (ASes) that exchange reachability information to destinations using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Network operators in each AS configure BGP routers to control the routes that are learned, selected, and announced to other routers. Faults in BGP configuration can cause forwarding loops, packet loss, and unintended paths between hosts, each of which constitutes a failure of the Internet routing infrastructure. This paper describes the design and implementation of rcc, the router configuration checker, a tool that finds faults in BGP configurations using static analysis. rcc detects faults by checking constraints that are based on a high-level correctness specification. rcc detects two broad classes of faults: route validity faults, where routers may learn routes that do not correspond to usable paths, and path visibility faults, where routers may fail to learn routes for paths that exist in the network. rcc enables network operators to test and debug configurations before deploying them in an operational network, improving on the status quo where most faults are detected only during operation. rcc has been downloaded by more than sixty-five network operators to date, some of whom have shared their configurations with us. We analyze network-wide configurations from 17 different ASes to detect a wide variety of faults and use these findings to motivate improvements to the Internet routing infrastructure.
Pharmacokinetic modeling of gastric emptying and small intestinal transit time in dogs using paracetamol and sulfasalazine as markers Master ’ s degree project

In this thesis, two pharmacokinetic models are evaluated with respect to their capacity to quantify gastric emptying and small intestinal transit in dogs. The experiments are based on the double marker technique, which uses two drug substances (paracetamol and sulfasalazine) that are absorbed in the duodenum and the colon, respectively. A standard model is compared to a more sophisticated transit rate model. It is shown that both models provide reasonable predictions for the plasma levels of paracetamol, but for the sulfasalazine data, the transit rate model produce considerably better fit than the standard model. Based on this study, the transit rate model seems to be the best choice for the analysis of double marker experiments.
Cytochrome c maturation system on the negative side of bioenergetic membranes: CCB or System IV

Cytochromes of the c‐type contain hemes covalently attached via one or, more generally, two thioether bonds between the vinyls of heme b and the thiols of cysteine residues of apocytochromes. This post‐translational modification relies on membrane‐associated specific biogenesis proteins, referred to as cytochrome c maturation systems. At least three different versions (i.e. Systems I–III) are found on the positive side of bioenergetic membranes in different organisms and compartments. The present minireview is concerned with systems on the negative side of the membranes. It describes System IV, also referred to as cofactor assembly on complex C subunit B, for heme binding on cytochrome b6 through one thioether bond; this covalent heme is usually called ci. This system is found in all organisms with oxygenic photosynthesis but not in Firmicutes, although they also have a cytochrome b protein with an additional heme ci covalently attached via a single thioether bond.
Diffusion of Personalized E-Government Services among Dutch Municipalities: An Empirical Investigation and Explanation

This article describes the trend of personalization in electronic service delivery, with a special focus on municipal electronic service delivery in the Netherlands. Personalization of electronic services refers to the one-to-one citizen orientation using authentication, profiling and customization techniques. The percentage of Dutch municipalities offering services through personalized electronic counters has increased from 14% 2006 to 28% 2009. Using binary logistic regression analyses of 2008 survey data, it is concluded that personalization is positively associated with size of municipalities but not with e-government and policy innovation statements, nor with explicit political responsibility with respect to e-government development. Based on these findings, alternative explanations for the adoption and diffusion of personalized e-government services are suggested.
A semantic approach to retrieving, linking, and integrating heterogeneous geospatial data

There is a tremendous amount of geospatial data available, and there are numerous methods for extracting, processing and integrating geospatial sources. However, end-users' ability to retrieve, combine, and integrate heterogeneous geospatial data is limited. This paper presents a new semantic approach that allows users to easily extract, link, and integrate geospatial data from various sources by demonstration in an interactive interface, which is implemented in a tool called Karma. First, we encapsulate the retrieval algorithms as web services and invoke the services to extract geospatial data from various sources. Then we model and publish the extracted geospatial data to RDF for eliminating the data heterogeneity. Finally, we link the geospatial data (in RDF) from different sources using a semantic matching algorithm and integrate them using SPARQL queries. This approach empowers end users to rapidly extract geospatial data from diverse sources, to easily eliminate heterogeneity and to semantically link and integrate sources.
A 0.4-V 410-nW opamp-less continuous-time ΣΔ modulator for biomedical applications

A 0.4-V opamp-less ΣΔ modulator for biomedical applications is presented. The continuous-time (CT) 2nd order ΣΔ modulator is realized using a passive filter topology. In order to obtain a small area, all capacitors are realized using parallel compensated depletion-mode MOSCAPs. To maximize the performance, genetic algorithms (GAs) are used to optimize the circuit for smaller area and higher signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR). In the dynamic comparator, which is the only active block in the circuit, bulk-driven technique is used to obtain lower supply voltage operation. The circuit was designed in a 130 nm CMOS technology and, using a clock frequency of 2 MHz, has a bandwidth of 10 kHz to cover the most common bio-potential signals. The electrical transient noise simulation results show that the circuit achieves a peak SNDR of 58 dB and a dynamic range of 64 dB while dissipating only 410 nW, which corresponds to an energy efficiency of 32 fJ/conv. -step.
Effects of Rotation Interval on Sleepiness and Circadian Dynamics on Forward Rotating 3-Shift Systems

A physiologically based mathematical model of sleep-wake cycles is used to examine the effects of shift rotation interval (RI) (i.e., the number of days spent on each shift) on sleepiness and circadian dynamics on forward rotating 3-shift schedules. The effects of the schedule start time on the mean shift sleepiness are also demonstrated but are weak compared to the effects of RI. The dynamics are studied for a parameter set adjusted to match a most common natural sleep pattern (i.e., sleep between 0000 and 0800) and for common light conditions (i.e., 350 lux of shift lighting, 200 lux of daylight, 100 lux of artificial lighting during nighttime, and 0 lux during sleep). Mean shift sleepiness on a rotating schedule is found to increase with RI, reach maximum at intermediate RI=6 d, and then decrease. Complete entrainment to shifts within the schedules is not achieved at RI≤10 d. However, circadian oscillations synchronize to the rotation cycles, with RI=1,2 d and RI≥6 d demonstrating regular periodic changes of the circadian rhythm. At rapid rotation, circadian phase stays within a small 4-h interval, whereas slow rotation leads to around-the-clock transitions of the circadian phase with constantly delayed sleep times. Schedules with RI=3-5 d are not able to entrain the circadian rhythms, even in the absence of external circadian disturbances like social commitments and days off. To understand the circadian dynamics on the rotating shift schedules, a shift response map is developed, showing the direction of circadian change (i.e., delay or advance) depending on the relation between the shift start time and actual circadian phase. The map predicts that the un-entrained dynamics come from multiple transitions between advance and delay behavior on the shifts in the schedules. These are primarily caused by the imbalance between the amount of delay and advance on the different shift types within the schedule. Finally, it is argued that shift response maps can aid in the development of shift schedules with desired circadian characteristics.
Near minimax line spectral estimation

Line spectral estimation is a classical signal processing problem involving estimation of frequencies and amplitudes from noisy equispaced samples of a sparse combination of complex sinusoids. We view this as a sparse recovery problem with a continuous, infinite dictionary, and employ tools from convex optimization for estimation. In this paper, we establish that using atomic norm soft thresholding (AST), we can achieve near minimax optimal prediction error rate for line spectral estimation, in spite of having a highly coherent dictionary corresponding to arbitrarily close frequencies. We also derive guarantees on the frequency localization performance of AST.
Toward abstraction from multi-modal data: Empirical studies on multiple time-scale recurrent models

The abstraction tasks are challenging for multi-modal sequences as they require a deeper semantic understanding and a novel text generation for the data. Although the recurrent neural networks (RNN) can be used to model the context of the time-sequences, in most cases the long-term dependencies of multi-modal data make the back-propagation through time training of RNN tend to vanish in the time domain. Recently, inspired from Multiple Time-scale Recurrent Neural Network (MTRNN) [1], an extension of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), called Multiple Time-scale Gated Recurrent Unit (MTGRU), has been proposed [2] to learn the long-term dependencies in natural language processing. Particularly it is also able to accomplish the abstraction task for paragraphs given that the time constants are well defined. In this paper, we compare the MTRNN and MTGRU in terms of its learning performances as well as their abstraction representation on higher level (with a slower neural activation). This was done by conducting two studies based on a smaller dataset (two-dimension time sequences from non-linear functions) and a relatively large data-set (43-dimension time sequences from iCub manipulation tasks with multi-modal data). We conclude that gated recurrent mechanisms may be necessary for learning long-term dependencies in large dimension multi-modal data-sets (e.g. learning of robot manipulation), even when natural language commands was not involved. But for smaller learning tasks with simple time-sequences, generic version of recurrent models, such as MTRNN, were sufficient to accomplish the abstraction task.