Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Crime, conflict and politics in transition-era South Africa

Despite the potentially catastrophic repercussions of South Africa's violent crime epidemic, little progress has been made in understanding why violence has persisted and even escalated since the end of apartheid in 1994. Adopting an historical approach that highlights the persistence of urban violence throughout the twentieth century, this article focuses on the criminal dimensions of the 'political' conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s. The advent of democracy was not in itself sufficient to erase a deeply entrenched culture of violence produced by decades of repressive racial policing, violent crime and social conflict. Moreover, politicized hostilities and the continuing deterioration of law and order structures in the final years of apartheid gave birth to various groups that engaged in criminal violence and provided favourable conditions for well established criminal networks. Such elements were unlikely to put down their guns and relinquish power simply because politicians declared the fighting to be over. Situating transition-era violence within its historic context and broadening the narrow conception of 'political' conflict enable us to better understand both this fractious period and the violence that continues to afflict South Africa. FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, SOUTH AFRICA HAS AVERAGED more than 20,000 murders and 50,000 reported rapes and attempted rapes annually. ' The repercussions of this violent crime epidemic are potentially catastrophic, yet little progress has been made in understanding why violence has persisted and even escalated since the end of apartheid in 1994. Popular explanations typically concentrate on the immediate environment, including poverty and joblessness, a new criminal-friendly constitution, a corrupt and ineffective national police force and the post-apartheid influx of African migrants.2 To the extent that history is considered, the roots of lawlessness and violent crime are often traced back to the 'political' violence of the The author is at Dalhousie University, Canada: gkynoch@dal.ca 1. www.saps. gov.za. 2. In an ongoing study of the impact of crime and violence in Gauteng townships, residents have consistently listed these factors as the most important contributors to high crime rates in the post-apartheid period. Elements within the media often echo these same sentiments. For an indication of township residents' views of crime and policing, see Gary Kynoch, 'Apartheid nostalgia: personal security concerns in South African townships', SA Crime Quarterly, 5 September (2003), pp. 7-10.
Sphere-packing bound for symmetric classical-quantum channels

“To be considered for the 2017 IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award. ” We provide a sphere-packing lower bound for the optimal error probability in finite blocklengths when coding over a symmetric classical-quantum channel. Our result shows that the pre-factor can be significantly improved from the order of the subexponential to the polynomial, This established pre-factor is arguably optimal because it matches the best known random coding upper bound in the classical case. Our approaches rely on a sharp concentration inequality in strong large deviation theory and crucial properties of the error-exponent function.
Investigation of the Gene Expression Levels of 5 α-reductase, VEGF and IL-1α in HaCaT Cells after the Application of a Botanical Extract

Background: Hair loss also known as alopecia is a common dermatological problem both for men and women all over the world. Deficiency in nutrition of the hair due to decrease in the micro-circulation in the scalp, or aging of the follicle cells due to lack of care are counted as significant causal reasons for hair loss. Treatment methods by using natural products such as plants and their derivatives are of great interest. In our study, HaCaT human keratinocyte cells were used as a model to demonstrate the effect of a botanical extract resulting from the specific plants of a unique Northeastern region of Turkey (Anzer) on gene expression of the cells. Material and Methods: Cell proliferation assay was performed by XTT reagent. After determination of non-cytotoxic concentration, cells were treated with plant mix and incubated for five days. RNA isolations were carried out from both non-treated and treated cell groups by using Tri-reagent. Gene expression of VEGF, IL-1a and 5-alpha reductase was determined by qPCR analysis. Results: The results demonstrated that Plant extract used in the current study revealed anti-inflammatory and anti-androgenic properties by downregulating IL-1α a and 5-α-reductase gene expressions, respectively. Furthermore, it led to upregulate VEGF gene expression which is a significant growth promoting factor for HaCaT cells. Conclusion: This plant mix seems to be a promosing candidate for preventing hair loss due to its anti-inflammatory, anti-androgenic and hair promoting properties.
Electrical Characterization for Intertier Connections and Timing Analysis for 3-D ICs

Reducing interconnect delay and power consumption has become a major concern in deep submicron designs. 3-D technologies have been proposed as a promising solution to mitigate interconnect problems. This paper examines the electrical characterization of vertical intertier connections such as through silicon via (TSV) and microbumps considering process variations and studies their timing impact on the circuit level. We first provide parasitic RC characteristics of intertier connections including TSV and microbumps and examine their delay. Then circuit simulation is performed to evaluate the timing impact of intertier connections.
Behavioral/systems/cognitive Neocortical Network Activity in Vivo Is Generated through a Dynamic Balance of Excitation and Inhibition

The recurrent excitatory and inhibitory connections between and within layers of the cerebral cortex are fundamental to the operation of local cortical circuits. Models of cortical function often assume that recurrent excitation and inhibition are balanced, and we recently demonstrated that spontaneous network activity in vitro contains a precise balance of excitation and inhibition; however, the existence of a balance between excitation and inhibition in the intact and spontaneously active cerebral cortex has not been directly tested. We examined this hypothesis in the prefrontal cortex in vivo, during the slow (Ͻ1 Hz) oscillation in ketamine–xylazine-anesthetized ferrets. We measured persistent network activity (Up states) with extracellular multiple unit and local field potential recording, while simultaneously recording synaptic currents in nearby cells. We determined the reversal potential and conductance change over time during Up states and found that the body of Up state activity exhibited a steady reversal potential (Ϫ37 mV on average) for hundreds of milliseconds, even during substantial (21 nS on average) changes in membrane conductance. Furthermore, we found that both the initial and final segments of the Up state were characterized by significantly more depolarized reversal potentials and concomitant increases in excitatory conductance, compared with the stable middle portions of Up states. This ongoing temporal evolution between excitation and inhibition, which exhibits remarkable proportionality within and across neurons in active local networks, may allow for rapid transitions between relatively stable network states, permitting the modulation of neuronal responsiveness in a behaviorally relevant manner.
Towards fast and adaptive optimal control policies for robots : A direct policy search approach

Optimal control methods are generally too expensive to be applied on-line and in real-time to the control of robots. An alternative method consists in tuning a parametrized reactive controller so that it converges to optimal behavior. In this paper we present such a method based on the “direct Policy Search” paradigm to get a cost-efficient control policy for a simulated two degrees-of-freedom planar arm actuated by six muscles. We learn a parametric controller from demonstration using a few near-optimal trajectories. Then we tune the parameters of this controller using two versions of a Cross-Entropy Policy Search method that we compare. Finally, we show that the resulting controller is 20000 times faster than an optimal control method producing the same trajectories.
Cellular Prion Protein Promotes Brucella Infection into Macrophages

The products of the Brucella abortus virB gene locus, which are highly similar to conjugative DNA transfer system, enable the bacterium to replicate within macrophage vacuoles. The replicative phagosome is thought to be established by the interaction of a substrate of the VirB complex with macrophages, although the substrate and its host cellular target have not yet been identified. We report here that Hsp60, a member of the GroEL family of chaperonins, of B. abortus is capable of interacting directly or indirectly with cellular prion protein (PrPC) on host cells. Aggregation of PrPC tail-like formation was observed during bacterial swimming internalization into macrophages and PrPC was selectively incorporated into macropinosomes containing B. abortus. Hsp60 reacted strongly with serum from human brucellosis patients and was exposed on the bacterial surface via a VirB complex–associated process. Under in vitro and in vivo conditions, Hsp60 of B. abortus bound to PrPC. Hsp60 of B. abortus, expressed on the surface of Lactococcus lactis, promoted the aggregation of PrPC but not PrPC tail formation on macrophages. The PrPC deficiency prevented swimming internalization and intracellular replication of B. abortus, with the result that phagosomes bearing the bacteria were targeted into the endocytic network. These results indicate that signal transduction induced by the interaction between bacterial Hsp60 and PrPC on macrophages contributes to the establishment of B. abortus infection.
gff2aplot: Plotting sequence comparisons

SUMMARY gff2aplot is a program to visualize the alignment of two sequences together with their annotations. Input for the program consists of single or multiple files in GFF-format which specify the alignment coordinates and annotation features of both sequences. Output is in PostScript format of any size. The features to be displayed are highly customizable to meet user specific needs. The program serves to generate print-quality images for comparative genome sequence analysis. AVAILABILITY gff2aplot is freely available under the GNU software licence and can be downloaded from the address specified below. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION http://genome.imim. es/software/gfftools/GFF2APLOT.html
Raman Spectroscopy: A Promising Technique for Analyzing Nucleic Acid Refractory to PCR Amplification

Ancient DNA (aDNA) refers to the genetic material found in dead paleontological and archeological samples. Being subject to various types of stressors, it undergoes different hydrolytic and oxidative post mortem modifications that result in the formation of DNA lesions. These lesions are found to either block the DNA polymerase during replication or induce nucleotide misincorporations. Besides, aDNA samples occur in minimal quantities; which represents an additional obstacle that researchers have to overcome in order to study aDNA. The earliest major efforts included the use of molecular cloning and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify aDNA sequences. These techniques were later found to be associated with a number of false results and unauthentic findings. There have been numerous attempts to eliminate the shortcomings of PCR and improve the quality of aDNA through avoiding contamination, repairing lesions, using translesion polymerases, etc. However, the majority of these have failed to yield accurate and specific results. Surface- enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS), on the other hand, starts in the right foot by introducing a sensitive non- enzymatic approach for the specific detection of single- and double-stranded DNA. The ability of this method to evade DNA degradation is particularly important for not only studying aDNA, but also analyzing DNA refractory to PCR amplification in processed products.
Five Dietary Recommendations for High LDL Levels

Case No. 1 A 5-ft-8-in tall, 172-lb, 65-year-old woman has a total cholesterol level of 289 mg/dL; triglycerides, 108 mg/dL; LDL, 205 mg/dL; and HDL, 62 mg/dL. She does not smoke and has blood pressure of 122/70. There is no family history of premature coronary artery disease, but both her parents died in their 80s from massive strokes. Her older brother also had a stroke at age 60. She has tried 4 different statin drugs in the past 2 years and states that with each drug, she develops the insidious onset of lethargy, fatigue, and achiness, which resolve within 1 week of stopping the drug. She is highly motivated and is requesting dietary recommendations to reduce her LDL cholesterol.
Optimizing the TLB Shootdown Algorithm with Page Access Tracking

The operating system is tasked with maintaining the coherency of per-core TLBs, necessitating costly synchronization operations, notably to invalidate stale mappings. As core-counts increase, the overhead of TLB synchronization likewise increases and hinders scalability, whereas existing software optimizations that attempt to alleviate the problem (like batching) are lacking. We address this problem by revising the TLB synchronization subsystem. We introduce several techniques that detect cases whereby soon-to-be invalidated mappings are cached by only one TLB or not cached at all, allowing us to entirely avoid the cost of synchronization. In contrast to existing optimizations, our approach leverages hardware page access tracking. We implement our techniques in Linux and find that they reduce the number of TLB invalidations by up to 98% on average and thus improve performance by up to 78%. Evaluations show that while our techniques may introduce overheads of up to 9% when memory mappings are never removed, these overheads can be avoided by simple hardware enhancements.
Effect of constant light and circadian entrainment of perS flies: evidence for light‐mediated delay of the negative feedback loop in Drosophila.

Light is the dominant environmental cue that provides temporal information to circadian pacemakers. In Drosophila melanogaster some period gene mutants have altered free‐running circadian periods but entrain to 24 h light‐dark cycles. To address the mechanism of light entrainment in Drosophila, we examined the effects of constant light on the period gene (per) and timeless gene (tim) products in wild‐type and perS flies. The results indicate that light affects three features of the PER‐TIM program: PER and TIM phosphorylation, PER and TIM accumulation, and per and tim RNA cycling. A post‐transcriptional effect on the PER‐TIM complex is the likely primary clock target, which then delays the subsequent decrease in per and tim RNA levels. This is consistent with a negative feedback loop, in which the PER‐TIM complex contributes to the decrease in per and tim RNA levels, presumably at the transcriptional level. There are enhanced constant light effects on the perS mutant, which further support negative feedback as well as support its importance to entrainment of these flies to a 24 h cycle, far from their intrinsic period of 19 h. The perS mutant leads to a truncated protein accumulation phase and a subsequent premature perS RNA increase. A standard 24 h light‐dark cycle delays the negative feedback circuit and extends the RNA and protein profiles, compensating for the accelerated RNA increase and restoring the rhythms to wild‐type‐like periodicity.
Intensification of the annual cycle in the tropical Pacific due to greenhouse warming

The annual cycle is one of the most important components of the global climate system Yet little attention has been paid to the response of the equatorial annual cycle to anthropogenic climate change. Here we present results from a global climate model with high tropical resolution that simulates a strong intensification of the annual cycle in the tropical Pacific in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations. This sensitivity of the tropical annual cycle to greenhouse warming can be explained in terms of tropical ocean‐atmosphere feedbacks. A possible amplification of the tropical annual cycle is expected to have also profound ecological and societal impacts.
Psychology and Pedagogy

Some one has said that all the mistakes in the world arise from insufficient observation. Perhaps we may say more correctly that all the mistakes in the world arise from insufficient or incomplete apperception. The man who apperceives is the man who delays judgment until he can relate his new experiences to the mass of known products that are similar to the new. Having brought the new product into its right relations with the whole, he is able to pronounce upon it correctly and with authority. The power to relate correctly, and to judge accurately, imparts stability to the character, and secures that organic firmness, suppleness, subtlety, adaptability, and individuality, which we call culture. Such culture secures its possessor against awkwardness, or embarrassment, and enables him to meet all emergencies with tranquilty and repose. Margaret K. Smith Oswego Normal School
A Comprehensive Analysis of Strength-Based Optimum Signal Detection in Concentration-Encoded Molecular Communication With Spike Transmission

In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of strength-based optimum signal detection model has been presented for concentration-encoded molecular communication (CEMC) with spike (i.e., impulsive) transmission based on amplitude-shift keying (ASK) and on-off keying (OOK) modulations. Strength-based optimum signal detection problem in diffusion-based CEMC system has been investigated in detail in the presence of both diffusion noise and intersymbol interference (ISI). The receiver for optimum signal detection has been developed theoretically and explained with both analytical and simulation results of binary signal detection. Results show that the receiver thus developed can detect CEMC symbols effectively; however, the performance is influenced by three main factors, namely, communication range, transmission data rate, and receiver memory. For both ASK and OOK receivers, exact and approximate detection performances have been derived analytically depending on the probabilistic nature of molecular availability and the relationship between mean and variance of signal strengths. Correspondingly, bit error rate (BER) performance of the optimum receiver in a single CEMC link is further evaluated under various scenarios through extensive simulation experiments.
Seascape and life-history traits do not predict self-recruitment in a coral reef fish

The persistence and resilience of many coral reef species are dependent on rates of connectivity among sub-populations. However, despite increasing research efforts, the spatial scale of larval dispersal remains unpredictable for most marine metapopulations. Here, we assess patterns of larval dispersal in the angelfish Centropyge bicolor in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, using parentage and sibling reconstruction analyses based on 23 microsatellite DNA loci. We found that, contrary to previous findings in this system, self-recruitment (SR) was virtually absent at both the reef (0.4–0.5% at 0.15 km2) and the lagoon scale (0.6–0.8% at approx. 700 km2). While approximately 25% of the collected juveniles were identified as potential siblings, the majority of sibling pairs were sampled from separate reefs. Integrating our findings with earlier research from the same system suggests that geographical setting and life-history traits alone are not suitable predictors of SR and that high levels of localized recruitment are not universal in coral reef fishes.
Fixed-priority scheduling of dual-criticality systems

In modern embedded platforms, safety-critical functionalities that must be certified correct to very high levels of assurance may co-exist with less critical software that is not subject to certification requirements. One seeks to satisfy two, sometimes contradictory, goals upon such mixed-criticality platforms: (i) certify the safety-critical functionalities under very conservative assumptions, and (ii) achieve high resource utilization during run-time, when actual behavior does not live up to the pessimistic assumptions under which certification was made. This paper makes two contributions: (i) it surveys different fixed-priority scheduling algorithms that have been proposed, that seek to balance these two requirements, and (ii) it completes prior work that performs a comparative evaluation of these different fixed-priority scheduling algorithms. It particularly focuses upon the period transformation technique for dual-criticality scheduling, since this technique has received relatively less attention in prior work.
Evaluation of missing values imputation methods in cDNA microarrays based on classification accuracy

Many attempts have been carried out to deal with missing values (MV) in microarrays data representing gene expressions. This is a problematic issue as many data analysis techniques are not robust to missing data. Most of the MV imputation methods currently being used have been evaluated only in terms of the similarity between the original and imputed data. While imputed expression values themselves are not interesting, rather whether or not the imputed expression values are reliable to use in subsequent analysis is the major concern. This paper focuses on studying the impact of different MV imputation methods on the classification accuracy. The experimental work was first subjected to implementing three popular imputation methods, namely Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), weighted K-nearest neighbors (KNNimpute), and Zero replacement. The robustness of the three methods to the amount of missing data was then studied. The experiments were repeated for datasets with different missing rates (MR) over the range of 0–20% MR. In applying supervised two class classification we adopted a twofold approach, introducing all genes expressions to the classifiers as well as a subset of selected genes. The feature selection method used for gene selection is Fisher Discriminate Analysis (FDA), which improved noticeably the performance of the classifiers. The retained classifiers accuracies using imputed data after applying the three proposed imputation methods show slight variations over the specified range of MR. Thus, assessing that the three imputation methods in concern are robust.