Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efferocytosis and extrusion of leukocytes determine the progression of early mycobacterial pathogenesis

ABSTRACT Macrophages and neutrophils are the first responders to invading pathogens and contribute strongly to the host defense against intracellular pathogens. The collective interplay and dynamic interactions between these leukocytes are to a large extent not understood. In the present study, we have investigated their role using a combination of confocal laser-scanning and electron microscopy in a zebrafish model for tuberculosis, a local Mycobacterium marinum infection in the tissue of the larval tail fin. Our results show that neutrophils are efficient in phagocytosis of mycobacteria and that they contribute largely to their dissemination. Macrophages appear to play a major role in efferocytosis, phagocytosis of dead cells that contain bacterial content. Phagocytic cells with large bacterial aggregates are formed that can be extruded out of the tissue after cell death. Alternatively, these excessively infected cells can undergo necrosis leading to immediate recruitment of surrounding leukocytes and subsequent phagocytosis of released bacteria. Our data show that these necrotic burst events result in progression of the infection, whereas extrusion abates the infection. Highlighted Article: Mycobacterial infection in zebrafish larvae was explored using a combination of light and electron microscopy. Macrophage burst events resulted in a progression of infection, whereas epithelium-mediated extrusion of infected immune cells abated infection.
On correlation among variables in decision-making, construct factors of inventory decision-making and market performance - an empirical study on Taiwan's instant noodles industry

Instant noodles were invented by Momofuku Ando, the founder of the Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd., The first package of instant noodles was formally launched into the market in 1958. This study, taking convenience stores as study samples, explores the variables in decision-making as well as constructs of inventory decision-making and market performance with regard to the instant noodles industry in Taiwan. The study is found that: (I). there are 6 factors affecting the inventory decision-making, and 8 variables have significant impact on “inventory policy”. (II). there are 6 factors affecting the market performance and 10 variables have significant impact on the above mentioned constructs.
Spatial Dependence and Economic Growth: Evidence from a Panel of Countries

The empirical literature about economic growth has usually ignored spatial interdependence among countries. This paper uses spatial econometrics to estimate a growth model that includes cross-country interdependence, in which a country’s economic growth depends on the growth rate of its neighbors. Based on a sample of 98 countries over three decades (1965-75, 1975-85, 1985-95) we find that spatial relationships across countries are quite relevant. A country’s economic growth is indeed affected by the performance of its neighbors and then influenced by its own geographical position. This result suggests that the spillover effects among countries are important for growth. Our results indicate that spatial interrelation can not be ignored in the analysis of economic growth. Ignoring such relationships can result in model misspecification.
Placental expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ): relation to placental and fetal growth.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The nuclear receptor peroxisome proliferator activated receptor γ (PPARγ) contributes to placental development and thus to the maternofetal transfer of oxygen and nutrients that allow for prenatal growth. We tested the hypothesis that placental PPARγ expression relates to placental and fetal growth. DESIGN AND STUDY POPULATION Placentas (n = 116) were collected at term delivery of singleton infants who were born small- (SGA), appropriate- (AGA), or large-for-gestational-age (LGA) (n = 32 SGA, 55 AGA, and 29 LGA). Placentas and newborns were weighed at birth. Real-time PCR was used to assess placental expression of PPARγ as compared to the housekeeping gene GAPDH. RESULTS PPARγ expression in placentas from AGA and LGA infants was nearly 2-fold higher than in placentas from SGA infants. Placental PPARγ expression associated positively to placental and/or fetal weight at birth, particularly within the SGA subpopulation (P = 0.001). CONCLUSION PPARγ expression was found to be low in placentas of SGA fetuses and to associate positively to fetal and placental weights within this subpopulation.
Management and Federation of Stream Processing Applications

A decade ago, stream processing has enabled a new class of applications by employing a fundamentally different processing model than conventional data base management systems. These applications process large volumes of continuous streams of input data with high throughput. Examples include network intrusion detection, financial transaction processing, and variable road tolling. Data stream management systems have evolved into industrial strength solutions for this class of applications and use long-running queries to process high volumes of continuous input data with low latency. However, they still lack flexibility in terms of large-scale deployment, integration, extensibility, and interoperability. In the last years, a substantial ecosystem of new applications has emerged that can potentially benefit from stream processing. They range from the federation of existing but heterogeneous streaming applications to automated deployments of streaming applications in large clusters or cloud environments to processing personal information like photos, e-mail, or text (SMS) messages as data streams. These applications introduce different requirements on how stream processing solutions can be deployed, integrated, extended, and federated. This thesis explores stream processing with the help of traditional stream processing applications as well as applications that process personal information as data streams. Despite or even because of the very different application use cases, the thesis identifies
Measuring domain wall fidelity lengths using a chirality filter.

The motion of transverse domain walls (DWs) in thin Permalloy nanowires has been studied by locally detecting the chirality of the moving DW, using a cross-shaped trap acting as a chirality filter. We find that structural changes of the DW occur over a characteristic minimum distance: the "DW fidelity length. " The measured field dependence of the fidelity length is in good qualitative agreement with a 1D analytical model and with published results of numerical simulations and experiments. We also demonstrate extension of the fidelity length to meter length scales using a series of filters.
Lower respiratory illness in infants and low socioeconomic status.

OBJECTIVES Infants from families of low socioeconomic status are said to suffer higher rates of lower respiratory illness, but this assertion has not been carefully examined. METHODS We studied the frequency and determinants of lower respiratory illness in infants of different socioeconomic status (n = 393) by analyzing data from a community-based cohort study of respiratory illness during the first year of life in central North Carolina. RESULTS The incidence of lower respiratory illness was 1.41 in the low socioeconomic group, 1.26 in the middle group, and 0.67 in the high group. The prevalence of persistent respiratory symptoms was 39% in infants in the low socioeconomic group, 24% in infants in the middle group, and 14% in infants in the high group. The odds of persistent respiratory symptoms in infants of low and middle socioeconomic status were reduced after controlling for environmental risk factors for lower respiratory illness. Enrollment in day care was associated with an increased risk of persistent symptoms among infants of high but not low socioeconomic status. CONCLUSIONS Infants of low socioeconomic status are at increased risk of persistent respiratory symptoms. This risk can be partly attributed to environmental exposures, most of which could be changed.
Calculating the complete pareto front for a special class of continuous multi-objective optimization problems

Existing methods for multi-objective optimization usually provide only an approximation of a Pareto front, and there is little theoretical guarantee of finding the real Pareto front. This paper is concerned with the possibility of fully determining the true Pareto front for those continuous multi-objective optimization problems for which there are a finite number of local optima in terms of each single objective function and there is an effective method to find all such local optima. To this end, some generalized theoretical conditions are firstly given to guarantee a complete cover of the actual Pareto front for both discrete and continuous problems. Then based on such conditions, an effective search procedure inspired by the rising sea level phenomenon is proposed particularly for continuous problems of the concerned class. Even for general continuous problems to which not all local optima are available, the new method may still work well to approximate the true Pareto front. The good practicability of the proposed method is especially underpinned by multi-optima evolutionary algorithms. The advantages of the proposed method in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency are illustrated by the simulation results.
New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory

In this paper, I argue that current approaches to modeling of concepts in bilingual memory privilege word representation at the expense of concept representation. I identify four problems with the study of concepts in bilingual memory: conflation of semantic and conceptual levels of representation; scarcity of methods targeting conceptual representation; assumption of the static nature of the conceptual store; and insufficient acknowledgment of linguistic and cultural specificity of concepts. Basing my arguments on recent developments in the fields of neurolinguistics, linguistics, psychology, linguistic anthropology, and second language acquisition, I suggest new approaches to the study of concepts in bilingualism, based on notions of concept comparability and concept encoding. Subsequently, I discuss various ways in which concepts could develop and interact with each other in bilingual memory and address possible individual, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic constraints on conceptual representation and interaction in bilingual memory.
Les systèmes d'appui à la création d'entreprises en Tunisie : quels enjeux et quels rôles pour les jeunes diplômés porteurs de projets? : cas de la région de Sfax

Dans cette these, nous identifions les determinants de la survie des nouvelles entreprises creees par les jeunes diplomes de l'enseignement superieur, beneficiant de prets bancaires a taux bonifie. Un accent est mis sur l’impact des politiques d’aides publiques. Les donnees sont issues d’une enquete realisee en 2013, sous la tutelle de l’Universite de Sfax, sur une cohorte de 160 entreprises creees entre le 01/01/2008 et 31/12/2008, soit cinq ans apres la creation. Le taux de reponse etait de 81,25%. Apres avoir evoque la problematique de survie de la petite entreprise nouvellement creee, nous recourons aux modeles de duree, et plus precisement au modele semi-parametrique de Cox (1972). L’analyse conduit a mettre en lumiere qu’un entrepreneur voit son entreprise plus perenne, lorsqu’il s’agit d’un homme etudiant qui s’est lance dans les affaires l’annee de l’obtention de son diplome, ayant un entourage entrepreneurial qui stimule chez lui le gout d’entreprendre et d’independance. L’amelioration de la survie decoule de la similitude entre l’activite prealable de l’entrepreneur et l’activite de son entreprise, et la detention d’un capital initial de demarrage qui depasse les 30.000 DT. Les aides octroyees par l’Etat aux nouveaux promoteurs (subvention d’investissement, bourse d’accompagnement, allegement des charges sociales et patronales) ne contribuent pas a diminuer le risque de l’echec entrepreneurial, a l’exception de la prise en charge par l’Etat d’une partie des salaires. Par contre une entreprise beneficiant d’une formation entrepreneuriale et d’un accompagnement post-creation, voit sa probabilite de survie s’accroitre.
Background subtraction-based multiple object tracking using particle filter

In surveillance system, many vision based methods are utilized for multiple objects. Some of the methods used for tracking include background modeling, Kalman filter, particle filter etc. The proposed method combines both the background modeling and particle filter to track multiple objects. This method consists of two steps: background subtraction and application of particle filter. Background subtraction restricts the area of search so that the particle filter performs efficiently. Different colored particles are displayed on the object for tracking. After applying the proposed method on a video having multiple objects, successful results were obtained.
An Evaluation of Harvest Control Rules for Data-Poor Fisheries

Abstract For federally managed fisheries in the USA, National Standard 1 requires that an acceptable biological catch be set for all fisheries and that this catch avoid overfishing. Achieving this goal for data-poor stocks, for which stock assessments are not possible, is particularly challenging. A number of harvest control rules have very recently been developed to set sustainable catches in data-poor fisheries, but the ability of most of these rules to avoid overfishing has not been tested. We conducted a management strategy evaluation to assess several control rules proposed for data-poor situations. We examined three general life histories (“slow,” “medium,” and “fast”) and three exploitation histories (under-, fully, and overexploited) to identify control rules that balance the competing objectives of avoiding overfishing and maintaining high levels of harvest. Many of the control rules require information on species life history and relative abundance, so we explored a scenario in which unbiased kn.
The effects of spatial selective attention on the somatosensory event-related potential.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a selective attention task involving weak or strong electrical stimuli delivered to the index fingers of the left and right hands. In an attend weak condition, subjects were asked to count the number of weak stimuli (targets) interspersed amongst strong stimuli (standards) delivered to a designated hand, whilst ignoring a similar set of stimuli delivered to the other hand. In an attend strong condition, subjects were asked to count the number of strong targets interspersed amongst weak stimuli. In both conditions, targets and standards occurred with probabilities of . 10 and . 40 respectively on each hand. Counting weak targets was found to be more difficult than counting strong targets. The latency of the earliest significant effect of selective attention on ERPs to standards was dependent on stimulus intensity: N80 in the case of weak standards, P105 for strong standards. There was no evidence of a later prolonged negative shift in attended standard ERPs. Rather, an enhanced N150 component post-centrally was followed by a prolonged positive shift of attended standard ERPs. This Late positive shift had a similar scalp distribution to the late positive component elicited by attended target stimuli.
Effect of Undercut Etch on Performance and Fabrication Robustness of Metal-Clad Semiconductor Nanolasers

We use optical, thermal, and electrical simulation to evaluate the effects of using varying amounts of undercut etch on wavelength-scale and subwavelength metal-clad semiconductor nanolasers (MCSELs). We find that as MCSEL diameter decreases, the optical performance becomes more sensitive to slight amounts of sidewall tilt. A modest amount of undercut (25%) dramatically improves the optical performance, reducing modal threshold gain to 100 cm-1 or less for lasers with core radius of 225, 550, or 775 nm, even in the presence of significant sidewall tilt (20° gain sidewall or ±8° pedestal sidewall tilt). Finally, we examine the effects of the increased undercut on nanolaser thermal performance and find that the increased resistive heating is insignificant near threshold, even for subwavelength nanolasers.
Cardiovascular responses to stress: I. Measures of myocardial response and relationship to high resting systolic pressure and parental hypertension.

A comparison of pre-ejection period (PEP), heart rate (HR), and systolic (SBP) and diastolk (DBP) blood pressure responses to the cold pressor test and a pseudo-shock avoidance reaction time task was performed in 183 young men. These tasks differ in the extent to which they evoke enhanced myocardial and vascular adrenergic activity. Decreases in PEP were more pronounced during the reaction time task, while DBP increased more during the cold pressor test. MR and SBP responses did not differentiate the two tasks. PEP decreases occurred in the absence of any apparent increase in cardiac preload or decrease in afterload. Parental hypertension as determined by physician reports was associated with higher SBP across all conditions. A subgroup of individuals (15%) showed SBP levels >140 mm Hg when typical clinical stethoscopic determinations were made, but less than half as many showed such elevations during a more extended resting baseline using remotely operated devices. High stethoscopic SBP was associated with greater cardiovascular responses to the stressors, while high SBP during the extended baseline was not.
New polyacrylamide gel‐based methods of sample preparation for optical microscopy: immobilization of DNA molecules for optical mapping

New methods have been developed for rapid immobilization of biological macromolecules and other microscopic objects from aqueous solution at gel/gel, gel/solid and gel/solution interfaces using thin polyacrylamide gels covalently bound to glass surfaces. When quickly spread over a dry gel, an aqueous sample loses most of its water and low‐molecular‐weight solutes due to migration of these components into the gel. All optically observable objects thus become concentrated at the gel surface and may be easily located by light microscopy. Based on this, a procedure for binding DNA at a positively charged gel/solution interface was developed. A mild immobilization of the DNA molecules was obtained, allowing ‘all in focus’ observations of DNA digestion by restriction endonucleases with an apparent rate close to that in solution.
Shared protection in virtual networks

Network virtualization is regarded as a promising concept solving the Internet ossification problem for the future Internet and as a method to provision well-framed cloud services. Providing resilience continues to be a key issue for future networks due to the high service requirements, growing data volumes, and the dependency of businesses and society on cloud services. We propose a novel architecture allowing the request of a complete resilient virtual network and - if necessary after its creation - sharing of its parts with existing virtual networks. As a proof of concept, we design networks using shared protection that can be optionally provisioned either at the virtual or at the physical layer and perform simulations. Our results show that shared protection models outperform the dedicated protection models with a reduction of the virtual network setup cost of up to 22% and of the required physical network capacity of up to 70% for the used topology and parameters. Moreover, for certain cost settings having resilience in the virtual layer brings a cost benefit of up to 83%. However, having resilience in the physical layer results always in a lower delay, number of virtual links and a higher network utilization efficiency.
Using Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Improving the Quality of ISO/IEC 15504 based Compliance Assessment Frameworks

Within the context of business processes design and deployment we introduce and illustrate the use of goal models for capturing compliance requirements applicable over business processes configurations. More specifically we explain how a goal-oriented approach can be used together with the ISO/IEC 15504 standard in order to provide a formal framework according to which the compliance of business processes against regulations and their associated requirements can be assessed and measured. The overall approach is discussed and illustrated through the handling of a real business case related to the Basel II Accords on operational risk management in the financial sector.
Distributed Representation of Sentences for Speculative Language Recognition in Biomedical Articles

We explore the automatic identification of speculative language in biomedical articles using distributed representation of sentences and deep learning methods. Such an identification has potential applications in information retrieval, multi-document summarization and knowledge discovery. We explore two methods that learn distributed representations of sentences, Paragraph Vector model and Recursive Neural Tensor Network, and compare them against three baseline algorithms, Support Vector Machines, Naive Bayes and pattern matching. We show that the RNTN (F1 = 0.885) marginally outperforms the best baseline algorithm, linear bigram SVM (F1 = 0.881), while the paragraph vector approach performs poorly (F1 = 0.368) even after training with a large unlabeled dataset. We discuss reasons for these differences in performance and give suggestions for future work.
Improving Voltage Disturbance Rejection for Variable-Speed Wind Turbines

In this paper, the effect of voltage dips on variable-speed wind turbines using VSCs is treated. Three different current controllers for the VSC are described and implemented. Their performance is evaluated when the converter is subject to different types of voltage dips. Both simulated and measured dips are used. The effect of the phase-angle jump of the dips is also taken into account.
Temporal Vaccination Games under Resource Constraints

The decision to take vaccinations and other protective interventions for avoiding an infection is a natural game-theoretic setting. Most of the work on vaccination games has focused on decisions at the start of an epidemic. However, a lot of people defer their vaccination decisions, in practice. For example, in the case of the seasonal flu, vaccination rates gradually increase, as the epidemic rate increases. This motivates the study of temporal vaccination games, in which vaccination decisions can be made more than once. An important issue in the context of temporal decisions is that of resource limitations, which may arise due to production and distribution constraints. While there has been some work on temporal vaccination games, resource constraints have not been considered. In this paper, we study temporal vaccination games for epidemics in the SI (susceptible-infectious) model, with resource constraints in the form of a repeated game in complex social networks, with budgets on the number of vaccines that can be taken at any time. We find that the resource constraints and the vaccination and infection costs have a significant impact on the structure of Nash equilibria (NE). In general, the budget constraints can cause NE to become very inefficient, and finding efficient NE as well as the social optimum are NP-hard problems. We develop algorithms for finding NE and approximating the social optimum. We evaluate our results using simulations on different kinds of networks.