Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immunogenicity of Novel Mumps Vaccine Candidates Generated by Genetic Modification

ABSTRACT Mumps is a highly contagious human disease, characterized by lateral or bilateral nonsuppurative swelling of the parotid glands and neurological complications that can result in aseptic meningitis or encephalitis. A mumps vaccination program implemented since the 1960s reduced mumps incidence by more than 99% and kept the mumps case numbers as low as hundreds of cases per year in the United States before 2006. However, a large mumps outbreak occurred in vaccinated populations in 2006 and again in 2009 in the United States, raising concerns about the efficacy of the vaccination program. Previously, we have shown that clinical isolate-based recombinant mumps viruses lacking expression of either the V protein (rMuVΔV) or the SH protein (rMuVΔSH) are attenuated in a neurovirulence test using newborn rat brains (P. Xu et al., Virology 417:126–136, 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2011.05.003; P. Xu et al., J. Virol. 86:1768–1776, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/JVI.06019-11) and may be good candidates for vaccine development. In this study, we examined immunity induced by rMuVΔSH and rMuVΔV in mice. Furthermore, we generated recombinant mumps viruses lacking expression of both the V protein and the SH protein (rMuVΔSHΔV). Analysis of rMuVΔSHΔV indicated that it was stable in tissue culture cell lines. Importantly, rMuVΔSHΔV was immunogenic in mice, indicating that it is a promising candidate for mumps vaccine development.
Predictive Modeling in the Military Similar Goals , Divergent Paths

Introduction Archaeology, as a discipline, addresses basic questions of time and space: How did things change or stay the same through time? How were things different or the same within a geographical area? Archaeologists examine the material remains left behind by human societies and attempt to identify temporal and spatial patterning. Based on observations of historical and contemporary societies and on theoretical constructs about how societies of different types operate, archaeologists assign meaning to those patterns and combine them into descriptions and explanations of life in the past. From its beginnings as an antiquarian pursuit, through the first 100 years or so as a scholarly discipline , American archaeology was largely descriptive and historical. Beginning in the 1960s, however, archaeologists began adopting an explicitly " scientific " approach to the study of the past—hypothesis testing, statistical sampling and analysis, and an emphasis on explanation. Given the importance of patterns of distribution, association, and relationship to the field of archaeology, it is not surprising that archaeologists during this period became interested in the possibilities of quantitative models as a pattern recognition tool. Because most of the theoretical perspectives that were in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s were ecologically based, most of the models that were developed focused on identifying correlations between quantifiable environmental variables and the location of archaeological sites. Depending on the predilec-tions of the modeler, these correlations were then used either directly to " explain " why the sites were located where they were or indirectly to test theoretically-based hypotheses about what factors might have conditioned the locations of human activities in the past. The potential for using these models to predict where archaeological sites should be located was also clear to researchers, who used predictive success as a means of testing and refining their models. Predictive models are tools by which trends are characterized and anticipated. The principles of predictive modeling extend back almost as far as the use of mathematics, though their application was somewhat less formalized for activities such as gambling, military tactics, and hunting. In the context of archaeology , a predictive model is a " simplified set of testable hypotheses, based either on behavioral assumptions or on empirical correlations, which at a minimum attempts to predict the loci of past human activities resulting in the deposition of artifacts or alteration of the landscape " (Kohler 1988:33). Most archaeological predictive models attempt to answer …
Election of variables and short-term forecasting of electricity demand based on backpropagation artificial neural networks

Forecasting of electricity demand is a fundamental requirement for the energy sector since from its results important decisions are taken. The areas involved are maintenance of electrical networks, demand growth, increased installed capacity, among others, whose lack of precision can take high economic costs. In this work, we propose a method based on backpropagation neural networks and election of key variables as inputs. The number of neurons in the hidden layer was optimized. To avoid the overtraining the best time range of data was defined. The results show that the method works particularly well for short-term forecasting (24 or 48 hours).
Stability concerns for indirect consumer control in smart grids

Demand side management will be an important tool for maintaining a balanced electrical grid in the future, when the penetration of volatile resources, such as wind and solar energy increases. Recent research focuses on two different management approaches, namely direct consumer control by an external third party, and indirect consumer control through incentives and price signals. In this work we present a simple formulation of indirect control, where the behavior of each consumer, is governed by local optimization of energy consumption. The local optimization accounts for both cost of energy and distribution losses, as well as any discomfort incurred by consumers from any shift in energy consumption. Our work will illustrate that in the simplest formulation of indirect control, the stability is greatly affected of both the behavior of consumers, and the number of consumers to include. We will show how instability is related to the local optimization problem of the consumer, and the information made available to him.
Optimizations of LFS with slack space recycling and lazy indirect block update

Even though the Log-structured File System (LFS) has elegant concept for superior write performance, it suffers from cleaning overhead. Specifically, when file system utilization is high and the system is busy, write performance of LFS degenerates significantly. Also, cascading update of meta-data triggered by modification of file data decreases LFS performance further. To overcome the performance drawbacks of LFS, we propose two schemes, namely Slack Space Recycling (SSR) and Lazy Indirect Block Update (LIBU). The SSR scheme writes modified data to invalid areas of used segments when on-demand cleaning is inevitable to serve incoming write requests. Also, the LIBU scheme accumulates meta-data update in memory beyond multiple segment writes without compromising consistency so as to decrease total amount of writes. From various experimental results, we observe significant performance improvements when employing the SSR and LIBU schemes for a wide utilization range.
The effect of grooved surface on dielectric window multipactor

Dielectric window breakdown remains a major limiting in transmission of high power microwave (HPM). The effect of surface roughness on multipactor from a periodic rectangular grooved surface under vacuum is investigated by using electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The microwave frequency is 2.86GHz. Vaughan's secondary emission model [3] is used to calculate the secondary electron yield. Electron cloud space distribution, statistic energy and secondary emission yield et al. are analyzed under periodic grooved surface. It is found that grooved surface with some height and width can significantly reduce the secondary emission yield and suppress multipactor.
Face Super Resolution: A Survey

— Accurate recognition and tracking of human faces are indispensable in applications like Face Recognition, Forensics, etc. The need for enhancing the low resolution faces for such applications has gathered more attention in the past few years. To recognize the faces from the surveillance video footage, the images need to be in a significantly recognizable size. Image Super-Resolution (SR) algorithms aid in enlarging or super-resolving the captured low-resolution image into a high-resolution frame. It thereby improves the visual quality of the image for recognition. This paper discusses some of the recent methodologies in face super-resolution (FSR) along with an analysis of its performance on some benchmark databases. Learning based methods are by far the immensely used technique. Sparse representation techniques, Neighborhood-Embedding techniques, and Bayesian learning techniques are all different approaches to learning based methods. The review here demonstrates that, in general, learning based techniques provides better accuracy/ performance even though the computational requirements are high. It is observed that Neighbor Embedding provides better performances among the learning based techniques. The focus of future research on learning based techniques, such as Neighbor Embedding with Sparse representation techniques, may lead to approaches with reduced complexity and better performance.
Visibility Enhancement of Mobile Device Through Luminance and Chrominance Compensation Upon Hue

The visibility of images displayed on mobile devices can significantly vary according to the lighting conditions. Generally, increasing the lighting scale produces a more compressed perceived color gamut. In addition, the compression rate of the perceived color gamut varies according to the hue angle. Therefore, this paper presents a method of compensating the luminance and chrominance according to the hue of the image displayed on a mobile device. Two psychophysics experiments are initially performed to analyze the human perception of luminance and chrominance. The perceived luminance and perceived chrominance reduction rates are then calculated for the primary colors. Next, to calculate the perceived luminance and chrominance reduction rates for all hue angles, piecewise linear interpolation is used between each primary color hue angle. Finally, the luminance and chrominance compensation rates are calculated by using the precalculated perceived luminance and chrominance reduction rates. The luminance and chrominance compensation rates according to the hue angle are then applied to an input image. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the colors in indoor and outdoor environments.
Dual Effects of Adp and Adenylylimidodiphosphate on Cftr Channel Kinetics Show Binding to Two Different Nucleotide Binding Sites

The CFTR chloride channel is regulated by phosphorylation by protein kinases, especially PKA, and by nucleotides interacting with the two nucleotide binding domains, NBD-A and NBD-B. Giant excised inside-out membrane patches from Xenopus oocytes expressing human epithelial cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) were tested for their chloride conductance in response to the application of PKA and nucleotides. Rapid changes in the concentration of ATP, its nonhydrolyzable analogue adenylylimidodiphosphate (AMP-PNP), its photolabile derivative ATP-P3-[1-(2-nitrophenyl)ethyl]ester, or ADP led to changes in chloride conductance with characteristic time constants, which reflected interaction of CFTR with these nucleotides. The conductance changes of strongly phosphorylated channels were slower than those of partially phosphorylated CFTR. AMP-PNP decelerated relaxations of conductance increase and decay, whereas ATP-P3-[1-(2-nitrophenyl)ethyl]ester only decelerated the conductance increase upon ATP addition. ADP decelerated the conductance increase upon ATP addition and accelerated the conductance decay upon ATP withdrawal. The results present the first direct evidence that AMP-PNP binds to two sites on the CFTR. The effects of ADP also suggest two different binding sites because of the two different modes of inhibition observed: it competes with ATP for binding (to NBD-A) on the closed channel, but it also binds to channels opened by ATP, which might either reflect binding to NBD-A (i.e., product inhibition in the hydrolysis cycle) or allosteric binding to NBD-B, which accelerates the hydrolysis cycle at NBD-A.
Toward a Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Resting-State fMRI Literature for Clinical Populations

Coordinate-based meta-analysis (CB-meta) is playing an important role in identifying spatially consistent findings for targeted questions in the neuroimaging literature, by quantitatively aggregating independent results reported in a standard coordinate space [1]. CB-meta has been widely used in voxel-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies, including task functional MRI (fMRI), where either patterns of within-group activation or patterns of between-group activation differences can be aggregated across studies. Given that variations in task design can introduce confounds into such pursuits, researchers work to limit any effort to the inclusion of studies using highly similar tasks. Task fMRI CB-meta papers have been published in most brain disorders.
Flexible, adaptable utility components for component-based robot software

Component-based software design is a current trend, both in general software practice and in robot software practice. It brings benefits to the field of robot programming. Component interfaces are fixed at design time and form a contract with other components, guaranteeing functionality. Known interfaces are typically important to reusability. However, in certain cases fixed interfaces can limit the reusability of components. Utility components provide general functionality that is reused a large number of times both within a single software system and between systems. They need to be adapted to the interfaces for each specific use case. This paper presents a set of utility components that can adapt their interfaces to the user's needs without any code changes. Dynamic programming language techniques are used to provide the adaptability. The components are a great benefit to the reusability of common utility components, removing a common cause of reinvention.
Secondary instability of crossflow vortices

Crossflow-dominated swept-wing boundary layers are known to undergo a highly nonlinear transition process. In low-disturbance environments, the primary instability of these flows consists mainly of stationary streamwise vortices that modify the mean velocity field and hence the stability characteristics of the boundary layer. The result is amplitude saturation of the dominant stationary mode and strong spanwise modulation of the unsteady modes. Breakdown is not caused by the primary instability but instead by a high-frequency secondary instability of the shear layers of the distorted mean flow. The secondary instability has been observed in several previous experiments and several computational models for its behaviour exist. None of the experiments has been sufficiently detailed to allow either model validation or transition correlation. The present experiment conducted using a 45° swept wing in the low-disturbance Arizona State University Unsteady Wind Tunnel addresses the secondary instability in a detailed fashion under a variety of conditions. The results reveal that this instability is active in the breakdown of all cases investigated, and furthermore, it appears to be well-described by the computational models.
AffyDEComp : towards a benchmark for differential expression methods

The issue of method validation is of great importance to the microarray community; arguably more important than the development of new methods [Allison et al., 2006]. The microarray analyst is faced with a seemingly endless choice of methods, many of which give evidence to support their claims of being superior to other approaches, which at times can appear contradictory. Method validation is a difficult problem in microarray analysis because, for the vast majority of microarray data sets, we don’t know what the “right answer” really is. For example, in a typical analysis of differential gene expression, we rarely know which genes are truly differentially expressed (DE) between different conditions. Perhaps the most well-known and widely used benchmark for Affymetrix analysis methods is Affycomp [Cope et al., 2004]. While a very valuable tool of summarization method validation, Affycomp is not ideal for comparison of DE methods because:
Benefit finding, self-efficacy beliefs and employment outcomes for individuals living with Multiple Sclerosis

There have been significant contributions to the literature concerning issues and experiences of employment for individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Recent research has also addressed the experience of benefit finding within this population and how it correlates with more effective coping strategies as well as higher levels of perceived social support and self~efficacy. Although one study revealed that higher levels of benefit finding were significantly correlated with unemployment, the research has not fully explored the relationship between benefit finding and employment outcomes within this population. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of how the experience of benefit finding may relate to self efficacy and employment outcomes for individuals with MS within the contexts of a biopsychosocial model of illness and social cognitive career theory. Previous research has largely focused on either disease~related factors or psychosocial factors as predictors of employment outcomes for individuals with MS. This study is unique in that it initiated a deeper exploration of the interplay between both types of variables. Results were mixed. As anticipated, there were significant relationships between the variables contained in the present study, including benefit finding, both forms of self-efficacy and disease severity. However, disease-related variables emerged as stronger individual predictors of employment outcomes, as compared to the psychosocial variables. The length oftime since an individual's diagnosis was also strongly related to employment status. Any predicted relationships concerning the career stage during which a person was diagnosed and self-efficacy beliefs or employment outcomes were insignificant. There were no significant gender differences found within the sample.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Investigating the Impact of Spectrum Efficient Ofdm-mimo and Mc-cdma-mimo Communication System for Its

For future wireless communications systems, parameters like high transmission data rate, spectral efficiency, and reliability are extremely necessary. In a multipath wireless channel, deploying multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver help us achieve higher data rate without increasing the total transmission power or bandwidth. When perfect knowledge of the wireless channel conditions is available at the receiver, the capacity has been shown to grow linearly with the number of antennas. The implementation of wideband MIMO system imposes major challenge to hardware designers due to the huge processing power required for MIMO detection. This can be overcome by using optimizing channel coding and MIMO detection. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) have been attracting much attention in this field of study. In this paper, a comparative study for OFDM-MIMO is presented regarding BER/PER performance and hardware complexity. All the simulations are conducted within MIMO-OFDM framework and with a packet structure similar to that of IEEE 802.11a/g standard. We have derived a channel capacity expression for MC-CDMA MIMO in a multiuser environment and confirmed by numerical evaluation that MC-CDMA MIMO provides a slightly higher capacity than OFDM MIMO assuming perfect ICI cancellation (ICIC) is always higher than or equal to that of OFDM MIMO. Furthermore, we compare the channel capacities of MIMO multiplexing and multiple single-input multiple output (SIMO) system. As per the results obtained, the MC-CDMA-MIMO appears to be an affordable solution for wideband MIMO system targeting Giga-bit speed wireless transmission and ITS applications.
Drought and flooding have distinct effects on herbivore-induced responses and resistance in Solanum dulcamara.

In the field, biotic and abiotic stresses frequently co-occur. As a consequence, common molecular signalling pathways governing adaptive responses to individual stresses can interact, resulting in compromised phenotypes. How plant signalling pathways interact under combined stresses is poorly understood. To assess this, we studied the consequence of drought and soil flooding on resistance of Solanum dulcamara to Spodoptera exigua and their effects on hormonal and transcriptomic profiles. The results showed that S. exigua larvae performed less well on drought-stressed plants than on well-watered and flooded plants. Both drought and insect feeding increased abscisic acid and jasmonic acid (JA) levels, whereas flooding did not induce JA accumulation. RNA sequencing analyses corroborated this pattern: drought and herbivory induced many biological processes that were repressed by flooding. When applied in combination, drought and herbivory had an additive effect on specific processes involved in secondary metabolism and defence responses, including protease inhibitor activity. In conclusion, drought and flooding have distinct effects on herbivore-induced responses and resistance. Especially, the interaction between abscisic acid and JA signalling may be important to optimize plant responses to combined drought and insect herbivory, making drought-stressed plants more resistant to insects than well-watered and flooded plants.
Extracellular Ubiquitin Increases Expression of Angiogenic Molecules and Stimulates Angiogenesis in Cardiac Microvascular Endothelial Cells

Extracellular Ub is an immune modulator that plays a role in suppression of inflammation, organ injury, myocyte apoptosis, and fibrosis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of extracellular Ub on the process of cardiac angiogenesis. CMECs and aortic tissue were isolated from rats to measure changes in angiogenic protein levels and to assess angiogenic responses to extracellular Ub. In CMECs, extracellular Ub increased protein levels of VEGF‐A and MMP‐2, known angiogenesis regulators. CMECs demonstrated enhanced rearrangement of fibrillar actin and migration in response to Ub treatment. Ub‐treated CMECs demonstrated an increase in tube network formation which was inhibited by the CXCR4 receptor antagonist, AMD3100. Methylated Ub, unable to form polyubiquitin chains, enhanced tube network formation. Aortic ring sprouting assays demonstrated that Ub increases microvessel sprouting in the Matrigel. The results of our study suggest a novel role for extracellular Ub in cardiac angiogenesis, providing evidence that extracellular Ub, at least in part acting via the CXCR4 receptor, has the potential to facilitate the process of angiogenesis in myocardial endothelial cells.