Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antigenicity and Immunogenicity of Plasmodium vivax Merozoite Surface Protein-3

A recent clinical trial in African children demonstrated the potential utility of merozoite surface protein (MSP)-3 as a vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum malaria. The present study evaluated the use of Plasmodium vivax MSP-3 (PvMSP-3) as a target antigen in vaccine formulations against malaria caused by P. vivax. Recombinant proteins representing MSP-3α and MSP-3β of P. vivax were expressed as soluble histidine-tagged bacterial fusions. Antigenicity during natural infection was evaluated by detecting specific antibodies using sera from individuals living in endemic areas of Brazil. A large proportion of infected individuals presented IgG antibodies to PvMSP-3α (68.2%) and at least 1 recombinant protein representing PvMSP-3β (79.1%). In spite of the large responder frequency, reactivity to both antigens was significantly lower than was observed for the immunodominant epitope present on the 19-kDa C-terminal region of PvMSP-1. Immunogenicity of the recombinant proteins was studied in mice in the absence or presence of different adjuvant formulations. PvMSP-3β, but not PvMSP-3α, induced a TLR4-independent humoral immune response in the absence of any adjuvant formulation. The immunogenicity of the recombinant antigens were also tested in formulations containing different adjuvants (Alum, Salmonella enterica flagellin, CpG, Quil A,TiterMax® and incomplete Freunds adjuvant) and combinations of two adjuvants (Alum plus flagellin, and CpG plus flagellin). Recombinant PvMSP-3α and PvMSP-3β elicited higher antibody titers capable of recognizing P. vivax-infected erythrocytes harvested from malaria patients. Our results confirm that P. vivax MSP-3 antigens are immunogenic during natural infection, and the corresponding recombinant proteins may be useful in elucidating their vaccine potential.
Kinematics Analysis of a Novel Five-Degree-of-Freedom Spatial Parallel Micromanipulator

A study of the inverse kinematics for a five-degree-of-freedom (DOF) spatial parallel micromanipulator is presented here below. The objective of this paper is the introduction of a structural and geometrical model of a novel five-degree-of-freedom spatial parallel micromanipulator, analysis of the effective and useful workspace of the micromechanism, presentation of the obtained analytical solutions of the microrobot’s inverse kinematics tasks, and verification of its correctness using selected computer programs and computation environments. The mathematical model presented in this paper describes the behaviour of individual elements for the applied 2-DOF novel piezoelectric actuator, resulting from the position and orientation of the microrobot’s moving platform.
MRI of the self molecules bound by maternal and cord autoantibodies Antibody Cord IgM

Autoimmune diseases are often marked by autoantibodies binding to self antigens. However, many healthy persons also manifest autoantibodies that bind to self antigens, known as natural autoantibodies. In order to characterize natural autoantibodies present at birth, we used an antigen microarray (antigen chip) to analyze informatically (with clustering algorithms and correlation mapping) the natural IgM, IgA, and IgG autoantibody repertoires present in 10 pairs of sera from healthy mothers and the cords of their newborn babies. These autoantibodies were found to bind to 305 different, mostly self, molecules. We report that in utero, humans develop IgM and IgA autoantibodies to relatively uniform sets of self molecules. The global patterns of maternal IgM autoantibodies significantly diverged from those at birth, although certain reactivities remained common to both maternal and cord samples. Because maternal IgG antibodies (unlike IgM and IgA) cross the placenta, maternal and cord IgG autoantibodies showed essentially identical reactivities. We found that some self antigens that bind cord autoantibodies were among the target self antigens associated with autoimmune diseases later in life. Thus, the obviously benign autoimmunity prevalent at birth may provide the basis for the emergence of some autoimmune diseases relatively prevalent later in life.
Spectropolarimetry of the Peculiar Type Ia Supernova 2005hk

We present Keck spectropolarimetry of the unusual Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) 2005hk several days before maximum light. An analysis of the high signal‐to‐noise ratio total‐flux spectrum shows the object’s extreme similarity to the peculiar SN 2002cx. SN 2005hk has an optical spectrum dominated by Fe iii lines and only weak lines of intermediate‐mass elements, unlike a normal SN Ia at this epoch. The photospheric velocity measured from the minima of strong absorption lines is very low for an SN Ia (∼6000 km s−1), solidifying the connection to SN 2002cx. The spectrum‐synthesis code SYNOW was used to identify the presence of iron‐peak elements, intermediate‐mass elements, and possibly unburned carbon at similar velocities in the outer ejecta of SN 2005hk. Many weak spectral features remain unidentified. The spectropolarimetry shows a low level of continuum polarization (∼0.4%) after correction for the interstellar component, and only a weak Fe iii line feature is detected. The level of continuum polarization is normal for an SN Ia, implying that the unusual features of SN 2005hk cannot be readily explained by large asymmetries.
Humanoids: Future Robots for Home and Factory

Humanoid robots have typically been thought of as service robots that work in a close relationship with one or more humans; however, we believe that humanoid robots can also play an important role in manufacturing, especially holonic manufacturing. In this paper, we discuss several key problems that must be solved before humanoid robots can assume useful roles in society, both at home and in the factory. We identify three basic classes of technologies that are needed to produce useful humanoids. The first consists of those key technologies that are needed for all humanoid robots, both for home robots as well as factory robots. The second class of technologies is more necessary for humanoid robots functioning in a home setting, while the third class is more appropriate for humanoids in the factory. In particular, we discuss in some detail two key technologies of the first class that we are developing in the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Vanderbilt University. The first is a simple and effective visual servoing method for achieving hand-eye coordination and the second is the Intelligent Machine Architecture (IMA), a software architecture for robot development. Additionally, we present two examples of how humanoid robots can be used in the home (as an assistant for the physically disabled) and in the factory (as an assembly holon).
An HMM trajectory tiling (HTT) approach to high quality TTS

The current state-of-art HMM-based speech synthesis can produce highly intelligible speech but still carries the intrinsic vocoding flavor due to its simple excitation model. In this paper, we propose a new HMM Trajectory Tiling (HTT) approach to high quality TTS. HMM is improved first with the minimum generation error (MGE) training. Trajectory generated by the refined HMM is then used to guide the search for the closest waveform segment “ tiles ” in rendering highly intelligible and natural sounding speech. Normalized distances between the HMM trajectory and those of waveform unit candidates are used for constructing a unit sausage (lattice). Normalized cross-correlation, a good concatenation measure for its high relevance to spectral similarity, phase continuity and concatenation time instants, is used to finding the best unit sequence in the sausage. The sequence serves as the best segment tiles to track closely the HMM trajectory guide. Tested on the two (small and large) British English databases used in Blizzard Challenge 2010, our HTT approach can render natural sounding speech without sacrificing the high intelligibility achieved by HMM-based TTS. They are confirmed subjectively by the corresponding AB preference and intelligibility tests.
Static and dynamic overprovisioning strategies for performance consistency in grids

It is not uncommon that grid users observe highly variable performance when they submit similar workloads at different times. From the users' point of view, such inconsistent performance is undesirable, and it leads to user dissatisfaction and confusion. We tackle this performance inconsistency problem using overprovisioning which is increasing the system capacity by a factor that we call the overprovisioning factor (к). Although overprovisioning is not cost effective, its simplicity makes it the preferred method for providing performance guarantees. Hence in this work, we present a realistic investigation of overprovisioning in grids. Towards this end, first we present a performance and cost evaluation of static and dynamic overprovisioning strategies. We find that the dynamic overprovisioning strategy, for which we use computing clouds, provides better consistency with lower costs compared to static strategies, and overprovisioning beyond a certain value of к (in our case к=2.5) incurs significant costs without significant consistency improvements. Then, we design and evaluate a feedback-controlled system to dynamically determine к to give performance guarantees to grid users. We show that our system determines к dynamically and provides significant improvements over the initial system, as high as 67%, in the number of jobs that meet the performance requirements.
Chain-based scheduling: Part I - loop transformations and code generation

Chain-based scheduling [1] is an e cient partitioning and scheduling scheme for nested loops on distributed-memory multicomputers. The idea is to take advantage of the regular data dependence structure of a nested loop to overlap and pipeline the communication and computation. Most partitioning and scheduling algorithms proposed for nested loops on multicomputers [1,2,3] are graph algorithms on the iteration space of the nested loop. The graph algorithms for partitioning and scheduling are too expensive (at least O(N), where N is the total number of iterations) to be implemented in parallelizing compilers. Graph algorithms also need large data structures to store the result of the partitioning and scheduling. In this paper, we propose compiler loop transformations and the code generation to generate chain-based parallel codes for nested loops on multicomputers. The cost of the loop transformations is O(nd), where n is the number of nesting loops and d is the number of data dependences. Both n and d are very small in real programs. The loop transformations and code generation for chain-based partitioning and scheduling enable parallelizing compilers to generate parallel codes which contain all partitioning and scheduling information that the parallel processors need at run time. This work is supported in part by the Australian Research Council under Grant No. S6600132 and by the donation of Fujitsu Laboratories LTD.
Online multi-person tracking with two-stage data association and online appearance model learning

This study addresses the automatic multi-person tracking problem in complex scenes from a single, static, uncalibrated camera. In contrast with offline tracking approaches, a novel online multi-person tracking method is proposed based on a sequential tracking-by-detection framework, which can be applied to real-time applications. A two-stage data association is first developed to handle the drifting targets stemming from occlusions and people's abrupt motion changes. Subsequently, a novel online appearance learning is developed by using the incremental/decremental support vector machine with an adaptive training sample collection strategy to ensure reliable data association and rapid learning. Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method while demonstrating its compatibility with real-time applications.
Evaluation of noisy transcripts for spoken document retrieval

Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is usually implemented by using an Information Retrieval (IR) engine on speech transcripts that are produced by an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. These transcripts generally contain a substantial amount of transcription errors (noise) and are mostly unstructured. This thesis addresses two challenges that arise when doing IR on this type of source material: i. segmentation of speech transcripts into suitable retrieval units, and ii. evaluation of the impact of transcript noise on the results of an IR task. It is shown that intrinsic evaluation results in different conclusions with regard to the quality of automatic story boundaries than when (extrinsic) Mean Average Precision (MAP) is used. This indicates that for automatic story segmentation for search applications, the traditionally used (intrinsic) segmentation cost may not be a good performance target. The best performance in an SDR context was achieved using lexical cohesion-based approaches, rather than the statistical approaches that were most popular in story segmentation benchmarks. For the evaluation of speech transcript noise in an SDR context a novel framework is introduced, in which evaluation is done in an extrinsic, and query-dependent manner but without depending on relevance judgments. This is achieved by making a direct comparison between the ranked results lists of IR tasks on a reference and an ASR-derived transcription. The resulting measures are highly correlated with MAP, making it possible to do extrinsic evaluation of ASR transcripts for ad-hoc collections, while using a similar amount of reference material as the popular intrinsic metric Word Error Rate. The proposed evaluation methods are expected to be helpful for the task of optimizing the configuration of ASR systems for the transcription of (large) speech collections for use in Spoken Document Retrieval, rather than the more traditional dictation tasks.
Maximizing forward progress with cache-aware backup for self-powered non-volatile processors

Energy harvesting is replacing battery to power embedded systems such as Internet of Things and wearable devices. Unstable energy supply brings challenges to energy harvesting powered system, resulting in frequent interruptions. Non-volatile processor is proposed to back up volatile logics before energy depletion and recover the system status after energy resumes. The backup efficiency of memory content significantly affects program performance. There are existing researches focusing on backup optimizations, but they did not fully consider cache behaviors. In this paper, we introduce cache persistence analysis into memory backup for self-powered non-volatile processors. The evaluation shows that the proposed cache-aware backup delivers on average 45.6% improvement in forward progress, achieving 40.2% and 12.7% higher system performance compared with instant and cache-unaware backup.
In vivo kinetics of thymidylate synthetase inhibition of 5-fluorouracil-sensitive and -resistant murine colon adenocarcinomas.

The predictive utility of several biochemical parameters of 5-fluorouracil (5-FUra) action was evaluated in four murine colonic adenocarcinomas: 5-FUra-sensitive Tumor 38 and 5-FUra-resistant Tumors 07/A, 51 and 06/A. Thymidylate synthetase (TS) was determined by a tritiated 5-fluoro-2'-deoxyuridylate (FdUMP)-binding assay. Bolus 5-FUra (80 mg/kg, i.p.) administrated caused in all tumors a rapid decrease in free TS levels. Only Tumor 38, however, showed inhibition of TS to undetectable (less than 0.05 pmol/g) levels, which lasted up to 6 hr after treatment; correction for dissociation of endogenous TS: FdUMP:folate ternary complex during the TS assay was required. Total TS (free enzyme plus ternary complex) was determined with experimental conditions that achieved quantitative recovery of free TS from ternary complex. By 48 hr after 5-FUra, Tumor 38 showed a decrease in total TS proportional to the estimated log kill/dose of 5-FUra; in contrast, the resistant tumors showed no such decrease from pretreatment levels. Assay of FdUMP showed that the free nucleotide was formed rapidly in all tumors in excess over available TS-binding sites. However, tumor sensitivity did not correlate with peak or residual FdUMP levels or with deoxyuridylate levels, which were low and remained so in all tumors. Tumor sensitivity to 5-FUra also could not be explained by the small differences among the tumors in total perchloric acid-soluble metabolites of 5-FUra or drug incorporation into RNA. We conclude from these data that levels of free TS in the tumor after 5-FUra treatment are predictive of chemotherapeutic response in these murine models of human colonic adenocarcinoma.
Design of generalised Chebyshev lowpass filters using coupled line/stub sections

A new method for the design of distributed lowpass filters enables exact realisation of the series short circuited transmission lines which are normally approximated via unit elements in other filter realisations. The filters are based upon basic sections using a pair of coupled lines which are terminated at one end in open-circuited stubs. The approach enables realisation of transmission zeros at the quarter -wave frequency hence giving improved stopband performance. A complete design is presented and demonstrates excellent performance in good agreement with theory.
An Evaluation of the Circles Information Visualization Tool for Presenting Bayesian Network Output

Bayesian Networks are complex systems models that present rich output that can be difficult to communicate to users. In this paper a novel information visualization tool is evaluated for performance on accuracy, efficiency and user comprehension criteria. The visualization is tested across a range of user tasks, including identifying important information, inferring relationships between factors and comparing model outputs. While the interpretation of model output is less accurate for the visualization tool in question, this is balanced by significant gains in efficiency and user comprehension. It is suggested that the visualization is appropriate in contexts such as operational management where users refer to the tool often for support in making uncertain decisions, and can best be defined as a casual visualization to complement existing decision making activities on a daily basis.
FOLLOW THE LEADER: PRICE LEADERSHIP AND MULTI-MARKET CONTACT IN THE CANADIAN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY TPFFPT

Identifying conditions that differentiate mechanisms of tacitly cooperative market dynamics such as multi-market contact and price leadership is a complicated challenge that this study attempts to address. Multi-market contact occurs when the same firms compete with each other in more than one distinct product and/or geographic market (Baum and Korn, 1999). Multimarket contact, under various asymmetric market conditions, leads to mutual forbearance, a kind of tacit collusion that benefits oligopolistic firms through higher and more stable prices and profits (Bernheim and Winston, 1990). When a firm dominates in a market, it has a sphere of influence (Baum and Korn, 1999). Multi-market contact firms avoid pricing actions and other competitive behavior in each others’ spheres of influence for two possible reasons: fear of retaliation within their own spheres of influence (Edwards, 1955) and/or to gain from tacit cooperation that allows superordinate market domination (Simmel, 1950).
Performance of space-time block coding under impulsive noise environment

In this paper, we investigate the performance of orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) under impusive noise environment, the joint probability density function (pdf) of the noise signals in OSTBC systems is presented with statistical-physical Middleton Class A noise model. We derive the upper bound on the average pairwise error probability (PEP) under Class A noise environment by the moment generating function (MGF), and also evaluate the performance of symbol error rate (SER) over fading channels. It is observed that the performance of OSTBC will be degraded as the impulsive nature of the noise increases in Class A noise environment.
Smelling and tasting are believing : a studio inquiry into an intersensorial practice

In this thesis I sought to explore an intersensorial connection with my studio and art teaching practice through a studio-based inquiry by asking how can I utilize the senses of taste and smell in my studio practice in the visual arts? The question was first explored by focusing on certain physiological and psychological functions of our gustatory and olfactory senses and their link to memory and secondly by looking to literature within cultural studies, philosophies of art and art practices. This literature suggests that there is a growing acknowledgement of an intersensory way of knowing, yet its potential in the art classroom is still largely untapped. I chose to answer my question through a heuristic methodology by drawing from the research findings, personal observations, dialogues and experiences on taste and smell, memory and perception. The methodology was used to answer my question through a creative synthesis in four installations linking the two senses and memory and perception. Although I deem the installations as personally successful, I discovered that my personal aesthetic is largely based on pattern and order, which could both hinder and help in my teaching of an intersensorial practice. Teaching toward sensory awareness in a literate, visually oriented society may need to begin with a corporeal re-connection with and re cognition of our environment. Through the recognition of the "aesthetics of the everyday" such suggestions and implications for the art classroom are discussed
Influence of Learning Styles and Teaching Strategies on Students' Achievement in Biology

This study investigated the effect of learning styles (active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global) and teaching strategies (guided inquiry, demonstration and lecture) on students' achievement in biology. Three research questions and three null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. Two hundred and forty (240) Senior Secondary Two (SSII) biology students, comprising of one hundred and thirty six (136) females and one hundred and four (104) males were randomly drawn from six (6) Secondary Schools in Uyo Metropolis. A non-randomized control group pretest-posttest design was used for the study. Two research instruments used in gathering data for the study include: Biology Achievement Test (BAT) and Index of Learning Style Questionnaire (ILSQ). Pearson Product moment correlation was used to establish the reliability coefficient for Biology Achievement Test which stood at 0.86 Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) and Scheffe multiple comparison test were the statistics used to analyse the data. From the findings, a significant effect was found to exist in the academic achievement of biology students taught with guided-inquiry considering their learning styles. Key words: learning, learning style, teaching strategies