Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The personality of music genres

The idea that words used by people are indicative of their personality has been established in several studies. In this study, we ask whether song lyrics of different music genres (e.g., punk) are associated with different personalities. We tested the hypotheses that (1) personalities are associated with lyrics of various music genres and that (2) personality, as expressed in song lyrics, may be used for the classification of songs into genres. We used a database of 17,495 songs categorized into music genres and 2468 essays written by students whose personalities have been assessed through the five factor model of personality. The method uses sophisticated tools of Natural Language Processing. The research hypotheses were confirmed and it was found that it is possible to predict participants’ personality based on the similarity of their writing style to the style of various music genres, and that songs can be automatically classified into music genres based on the similarity of those songs to personality factors. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the lyrics of music genres can be used to predict personalities, and conversely, personalities can be used for genre identification and classification.
Work in progress - a game-based learning system for software engineering education

This study develops and evaluates a game-based learning system for a software engineering course. The game-based system adopts a role-playing strategy proposed by a digital game-based learning model and is designed based on the educational theory of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge that integrates pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge, and technological knowledge. By using the system, students learn about the process of software development in a team-based environment. In this learning environment, learners play different characters, such as a project leader, a system analyst, a system designer, or a programmer. The learners are also able to conduct collaborative activities with other team members during the software development process. To evaluate the effectiveness of the system, thirty-four undergraduate students in a software engineering course were recruited to evaluate the system via a questionnaire. The survey results indicated that students had a positive learning attitude toward the system usage.
Supplemental Material | Chemical Contamination of Green Turtle (Chelonia mydas) Eggs in Peninsular Malaysia: Implications for Conservation and Public Health

Although the effects of POPs on the health of free ranging loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) has been well investigated (Keller et al. 2004; Keller et al. 2006a; Keller et al. 2006b), there was only one previous study on the toxicological effects of POPs on sea turtle embryonic development (Podreka et al. 1998). However, there are a number of studies on freshwater turtles that have investigated the effects of POPs on embryonic sex reversal. Based on these studies, the PNECs could be determined for p,p'-DDE, dieldrin and PCBs. The PNEC for p,p'-DDE was estimated as 543 ng g-1 , based on a study on C. mydas that found no sex reversal of developing embryos up to a concentration of 543 ng g-1 (Podreka et al. 1998). A study on red-eared slider turtles (Trachemys scripta) found no significant sex reversal when embryos were dosed with 5 µL of 2.6 µM dieldrin (Willingham and Crews 1999). Based on an estimated penetration of 30% and an average egg mass of ~ 10 g, this dose represented egg concentration of ~ 40 ng g-1 dieldrin. Therefore, after applying an uncertainty factor of 10 for inter-species differences, the PNECs for dieldrin were estimated at 4 ng g-1. The effects of PCBs on sex reversal have also been studied on T. scripta (Bergeron et al. 1994). In this study, the topical administration of 10 µg of single PCB compounds to T. scripta eggs produced no sex reversal. Based on an estimated penetration of 30% and an average egg mass of 11.4 g, these doses represented egg concentrations of ~ 260 ng g-1. Therefore, after applying an uncertainty factor of 10 for inter-species differences, the PNEC for a single PCB was 26 ng g-1 .
Percutaneous Permeation Enhancement by Terpenes: Mechanistic View

A popular approach for improving transdermal drug delivery involves the use of penetration enhancers (sorption promoters or accelerants) which penetrate into skin to reversibly reduce the barrier resistance. The potential mechanisms of action of penetration enhancers include disruption of intercellular lipid and/or keratin domains and tight junctions. This results in enhanced drug partitioning into tissue, altered thermodynamic activity/solubility of drug etc. Synthetic chemicals (solvents, azones, pyrrolidones, surfactants etc.) generally used for this purpose are rapidly losing their value in transdermal patches due to reports of their absorption into the systemic circulation and subsequent possible toxic effect upon long term application. Terpenes are included in the list of Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) substances and have low irritancy potential. Their mechanism of percutaneous permeation enhancement involves increasing the solubility of drugs in skin lipids, disruption of lipid/protein organization and/or extraction of skin micro constituents that are responsible for maintenance of barrier status. Hence, they appear to offer great promise for use in transdermal formulations. This article is aimed at reviewing the mechanisms responsible for percutaneous permeation enhancement activity of terpenes, which shall foster their rational use in transdermal formulations.
IN-MACA-MCC: Integrated Multiple Attractor Cellular Automata with Modified Clonal Classifier for Human Protein Coding and Promoter Prediction

Protein coding and promoter region predictions are very important challenges of bioinformatics (Attwood and Teresa, 2000). The identification of these regions plays a crucial role in understanding the genes. Many novel computational and mathematical methods are introduced as well as existing methods that are getting refined for predicting both of the regions separately; still there is a scope for improvement. We propose a classifier that is built with MACA (multiple attractor cellular automata) and MCC (modified clonal classifier) to predict both regions with a single classifier. The proposed classifier is trained and tested with Fickett and Tung (1992) datasets for protein coding region prediction for DNA sequences of lengths 54, 108, and 162. This classifier is trained and tested with MMCRI datasets for protein coding region prediction for DNA sequences of lengths 252 and 354. The proposed classifier is trained and tested with promoter sequences from DBTSS (Yamashita et al., 2006) dataset and nonpromoters from EID (Saxonov et al., 2000) and UTRdb (Pesole et al., 2002) datasets. The proposed model can predict both regions with an average accuracy of 90.5% for promoter and 89.6% for protein coding region predictions. The specificity and sensitivity values of promoter and protein coding region predictions are 0.89 and 0.92, respectively.
Comparison of dual influenza and pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccination with influenza vaccination alone for preventing pneumonia and reducing mortality among the elderly: A meta-analysis

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to perform a meta-analysis comparing the effectiveness of influenza vaccination alone versus influenza plus pneumococcal dual vaccination for the prevention of pneumonia and mortality in adults ≥ 65 years of age. Medline, Cochrane, CENTRAL, EMBASE, and Google Scholar databases were searched. Inclusion criteria were: 1) Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 2-arm prospective studies, or retrospective cohort studies; 2) Patients were ≥ 65 years of age with or without chronic respiratory disease; 3) Patients received the influenza vaccine alone or dual pneumococcal and influenza vaccination; 4) Results included incidence of recurrent respiratory tract infections, length of hospital stay, and overall mortality rate. The outcomes were pneumonia and all-cause mortality rates. Of 142 studies identified in the database searches, 6 were ultimately included in the systematic review, and 5 were included in meta-analysis. The number of patients that received the influenza vaccination alone ranged from 211 to 29,346 (total = 53,107), and the number that received influenza+pneumococcal vaccination ranged from 246 to 72,107 (total = 102,068). Influenza+pneumococcal vaccination was associated with a significantly lower pneumonia rate than influenza vaccination alone (relative risk [RR] = 0.835, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.718–0.971, P = 0.019), and with a significantly lower all-cause mortality rate than influenza vaccination alone (relative risk [RR] = 0.771, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.707–0.842, P = 0.001). In conclusion, the results of this study support concomitant pneumococcal and influenza vaccination of the elderly as a dual vaccination strategy is associated with lower pneumonia and all-cause mortality rates.
Alterations in the Immunogenic Properties of Soluble Trimeric Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Envelope Proteins Induced by Deletion or Heterologous Substitutions of the V1 Loop

ABSTRACT HIV-1 gp140 envelope immunogens express conserved epitopes that are targeted by broadly cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies, but they fail to elicit similar antibodies upon immunization. The poor immunogenicity of conserved epitopes on gp140 could be linked to the high immunogenicity of variable Env regions on such constructs. Previous studies have shown that the first hypervariable region (V1 loop) is immunogenic on soluble gp140s but elicits type-specific antibodies. To address issues related to the high immunogenicity of the V1 loop, two conceptually opposite approaches were tested. In the first approach, we eliminated the V1 loop from our gp140 construct and examined how V1 deletion altered the immunogenic properties of other Env regions. In the second approach, we took advantage of the high immunogenicity of the V1 loop and engrafted four diverse V1 loops onto a common gp140 Env “scaffold. ” These four scaffolds were used as a cocktail of immunogens to elicit diverse anti-V1 antibodies, under the hypothesis that eliciting diverse anti-V1 antibodies would expand the neutralizing breadth of immune sera. Our study indicates that three of four heterologous V1 loops were immunogenic on the common Env backbone “scaffold,” but heterologous anti-V1 neutralizing responses were observed in only one case. Both types of V1 modification dampened the immunogenicity of the V3 loop, differentially altered the immunogenicity of the transmembrane gp41 subunit, and altered the relative immunogenicities of unknown Env regions, including potentially the CD4-binding site (CD4-bs) and trimer-specific targets, which elicited cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies but of limited breadth.
Prophylactic effects of secretion metabolites of dairy lactobacilli through downregulation of ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 genes on colon cancer cells

Colon cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers, and intestinal microbial community plays a pivotal role in colorectal tumor genesis. Probiotics as live microorganisms may be able to exert an anticancer effect in colon cancer. The aim of this study was to isolate and identify Lactobacillus spp. from traditional dairy products with probiotic properties and to investigate their anticancer effects through ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 gene expression in colon cancer cells. The isolated lactobacilli from yogurt and cheese samples were molecularly identified by blasting of 16–23s rDNA region PCR sequenced products. The probiotic properties, including acid and bile tolerance, antimicrobial activity, and antibiotic susceptibility, were assayed. The proliferation inhibition effects of lactobacilli secretion metabolites with probiotic potential on colon cancer cell lines (HT-29 and caco-2) were analyzed using MTT assay. The real-time PCR was used for assessment of ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 gene expression after being treated with probiotics. Four species of bacteria with the most probiotic properties, including Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus paracasei, Lactobacillus rhamnosus, and Lactobacillus plantarum, were characterized and their effects on different human cell lines were taken into consideration. Total bacterial secretions significantly reduced the viability of HT-29 and caco-2 cancer cells compared with untreated controls. The metabolites secreted by bacteria downregulated the expression of ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 genes in colon cancer cells. The present study indicated that probiotic bacteria isolated from traditional dairy products exert anticancer effect on colon cancer cells through the downregulation of ErbB-2 and ErbB-3 gene expression.
Road lane modeling based on RANSAC algorithm and hyperbolic model

This paper presents a simple and fast road lane detection and modeling method with high robustness. We use IPM transformation to get a “bird's eye view” of the road and do some image processing to avoid noise, then divide regions for each lane and implement a improved RANSAC algorithm to fit Hyperbolic model defined by us. Our method can successfully detect road lanes in various conditions and achieve reasonable results on KITTI dataset.
Quantifying the Dynamics of Coupled Networks of Switches and Oscillators

Complex network dynamics have been analyzed with models of systems of coupled switches or systems of coupled oscillators. However, many complex systems are composed of components with diverse dynamics whose interactions drive the system's evolution. We, therefore, introduce a new modeling framework that describes the dynamics of networks composed of both oscillators and switches. Both oscillator synchronization and switch stability are preserved in these heterogeneous, coupled networks. Furthermore, this model recapitulates the qualitative dynamics for the yeast cell cycle consistent with the hypothesized dynamics resulting from decomposition of the regulatory network into dynamic motifs. Introducing feedback into the cell-cycle network induces qualitative dynamics analogous to limitless replicative potential that is a hallmark of cancer. As a result, the proposed model of switch and oscillator coupling provides the ability to incorporate mechanisms that underlie the synchronized stimulus response ubiquitous in biochemical systems.
Research on electronic cheque system

Most of the organizations especially financial institutions use colored/texture paper for the signature on any text paper for their documentation, but they always keep their original signature record on the white paper. When these signatures are verified electronically, the results are not accurate because of the difference in color intensity. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed that automates the signature verification for the above purpose. The objective of signature verification is to judge whether an input signature of colored paper is a genuine signature or a forgery. The results are also presented, those are compared with the collected signature samples, and the original input signatures carried out. The signature verification of colored paper (SVCP) system can verify the signatures having different background colors, and also convert white paper background through variation of color intensity. The paper highlighted the issues and provides the solutions especially electronic cheque system, having different color background. Cheques play a vital role in today's banking but for electronic banking we need digital currency/digital cheque and in this paper we discuss how we recognize conventional cheques as a digital currency.
Visualization of large terrains made easy

We present an elegant and simple to implement framework for performing out-of-core visualization and view-dependent refinement of large terrain surfaces. Contrary to the trend of increasingly elaborate algorithms for large-scale terrain visualization, our algorithms and data structures have been designed with the primary goal of simplicity and efficiency of implementation. Our approach to managing large terrain data also departs from more conventional strategies based on data tiling. Rather than emphasizing how to segment and efficiently bring data in and out of memory, we focus on the manner in which the data is laid out to achieve good memory coherency for data accesses made in a top-down (coarse-to-fine) refinement of the terrain. We present and compare the results of using several different data indexing schemes, and propose a simple to compute index that yields substantial improvements in locality and speed over more commonly used data layouts. Our second contribution is a new and simple, yet easy to generalize method for view-dependent refinement. Similar to several published methods in this area, we use longest edge bisection in a top-down traversal of the mesh hierarchy to produce a continuous surface with subdivision connectivity. In tandem with the refinement, we perform view frustum culling and triangle stripping. These three components are done together in a single pass over the mesh. We show how this framework supports virtually any error metric, while still being highly memory and compute efficient.
DNA Alkylating Agents Alleviate Silencing of Class II Transactivator Gene Expression in L1210 Lymphoma Cells1

MHC class II (Ia) Ag expression is inversely correlated with tumorigenicity and directly correlated with immunogenicity in clones of the mouse L1210 lymphoma (1 ). Understanding the mechanisms by which class II Ag expression is regulated in L1210 lymphoma may facilitate the development of immunotherapeutic approaches for the treatment of some types of lymphoma and leukemia. This study demonstrates that the variation in MHC class II Ag expression among clones of L1210 lymphoma is due to differences in the expression of the class II transactivator (CIITA). Analysis of stable hybrids suggests that CIITA expression is repressed by a dominant mechanism in class II-negative L1210 clones. DNA-alkylating agents such as ethyl methanesulfonate and the chemotherapeutic drug melphalan activate CIITA and class II expression in class II negative L1210 cells, and this effect appears to be restricted to transformed cell lines derived from the early stages of B cell ontogeny. Transient transfection assays demonstrated that the CIITA type III promoter is active in class II− L1210 cells, despite the fact that the endogenous gene is not expressed, which suggests that these cells have all of the transacting factors necessary for CIITA transcription. An inverse correlation between methylation of the CIITA transcriptional regulatory region and CIITA expression was observed among L1210 clones. Furthermore, 5-azacytidine treatment activated CIITA expression in class II-negative L1210 cells. Collectively, our results suggest that 1) CIITA gene expression is repressed in class II− L1210 cells by methylation of the CIITA upstream regulatory region, and 2) treatment with DNA-alkylating agents overcomes methylation-based silencing of the CIITA gene in L1210 cells.
A Preliminary Study of Coordinated Worm Networks

A coordinated worm network (CWN) is a worm network in which all the worm agents are organized together and can communicate with each other, so that these independent worm agents can collectively decide on a set of activities to be executed. We mainly explore the applications of CWNs in distributed computing, content distribution and collaboration by relevant examples. The construction of CWNs is also discussed, and super-peer architectures are considered to be more suitable for CWNs since they can resist node churning, limit network traffic and block tracing to a certain extent.
As Múltiplas Funções do Orçamento Empresarial

The budget is one of the most important management artifacts and is used for different purposes. Studies have ignored that this artifact can be used for multiple functions and be perceived differently by executives within the same organization. This article discusses the idea of multiple purposes for corporate budgeting and investigates its association with the perceptions of usefulness and relevance. One single entity survey was carried out in an organization of the Brazilian Electric Utilities Industry from a questionnaire sent to executives from different areas covering a sample of 75 managers. The study reveals that the importance of the budget for both planning and dialog functions is associated to managers' perceptions of budgeting usefulness and relevance. Specifically, we have found that the dialog functions (ex post) are greater associated to the perceptions of usefulness for management and relevance for decision-making, than planning functions (ex ante). As a consequence, are obtained evidence that the corporate budgeting should not be seen as a static planning artifact, and concerns about, motivation, communication, some of the dialog functions should be considered as fundamental for the artifact to be explored with greater intensity in the organizational environment.
Exploring the benefit of synaesthetic colours: Testing for “pop-out” in individuals with grapheme–colour synaesthesia

In grapheme–colour synaesthesia, letters, numbers, and words elicit involuntary colour experiences. Recently, there has been much emphasis on individual differences and possible subcategories of synaesthetes with different underlying mechanisms. In particular, there are claims that for some, synaesthesia occurs prior to attention and awareness of the inducing stimulus. We first characterized our sample using two versions of the “Synaesthetic Congruency Task” to distinguish “projector” and “associator” synaesthetes who may differ in the extent to which their synaesthesia depends on attention and awareness. We then used a novel modification of the “Embedded Figures Task” that included a set-size manipulation to look for evidence of preattentive “pop-out” from synaesthetic colours, at both a group and an individual level. We replicate an advantage for synaesthetes over nonsynaesthetic controls on the Embedded Figures Task in accuracy, but find no support for pop-out of synaesthetic colours. We conclude that grapheme–colour synaesthetes are fundamentally similar in their visual processing to the general population, with the source of their unusual conscious colour experiences occurring late in the cognitive hierarchy.
Secrecy by typing in security protocols

We develop principles and rules for achieving secrecy properties in security protocols. Our approach is based on traditional classification techniques, and extends those techniques to handle concurrent processes that use shared-key cryptography. The rules have the form of typing rules for a basic concurrent language with cryptographic primitives, the spi calculus. They guarantee that, if a protocol typechecks, then it does not leak its secret inputs.