Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Continuous Bovine Kidney Cell Line Constitutively Expressing Bovine αVβ6 Integrin Has Increased Susceptibility to Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus

ABSTRACT Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a worldwide problem limiting the trade of animals and their products from affected countries. The rapid isolation, serotyping, and vaccine matching of FMD virus from disease outbreaks is critical for enabling the implementation of effective vaccination programs and to stop the spread of infection during outbreaks. Some primary cells have been shown to be highly susceptible to most strains of FMD virus (FMDV) but are difficult and expensive to prepare and maintain. Since the αVβ6 integrin is a principal receptor for FMDV, we transduced a bovine kidney cell line to stably express both the αV and β6 bovine integrin subunits. This stable cell line (LFBK-αVβ6) showed β6 expression and enhanced susceptibility to FMDV infection for ≥100 cell passages. LFBK-αVβ6 cells were highly sensitive for detecting all serotypes of FMDV from experimentally infected animals, including the porcinophilic FMDV strain O/TAW/97. In comparison to other cell types that are currently used for virus isolation, LFBK-αVβ6 cells were more effective at detecting FMDV in clinical samples, supporting their use as a more sensitive tool for virus isolation.
Manifest spin 2 duality with electric and magnetic sources

We extend the formulation of spin 2 fields on Minkowski space which makes the action manifestly invariant under duality rotations to the case of interactions with external electric and magnetic sources by adding suitable potentials for the longitudinal and trace parts. In this framework, the string singularity of the linearized Taub-NUT solution is resolved into a Coulomb-like solution. Suitable surface charges to measure energy-momentum and angular momentum of both electric and magnetic type are constructed.
SUMS OF CONNECTIVITY FUNCTIONS ON R

A function f : R → R is a connectivity function if the graph of its restriction f |C to any connected C ⊂ R is connected in R × R. The main goal of this paper is to prove that every function f : R → R is a sum of n+1 connectivity functions (Cor 5). We will also show that if n > 1, then every function g : R → R which is a sum of n connectivity functions is continuous on some perfect set (see Thm 8) which implies that the number n+1 in our theorem is the best possible (Cor 9). To prove the above results, we establish and then apply the following theorems that are of interest on their own. For every dense Gδ subset G of R there are homeomorphisms h1, . , hn of R such that R = G ∪ h1(G) ∪ . hn(G) (Prop 7). For every n > 1 and any connectivity function f : R → R, if x ∈ R and ε > 0 then there exists an open set U ⊂ R such that x ∈ U ⊂ B(x, ε), f |bd(U) is continuous and |f(x)− f(y)| < ε for every y ∈ bd(U) (Prop 10). Department of Mathematics, West Virginia University, PO Box 6310, Morgantown, WV 26506-6310, USA
A 1500 deg2 near infrared proper motion catalogue from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey

The United Kingdom Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) Large Area Survey (LAS) began in 2005, with the start of the UKIDSS programme as a 7 year effort to survey roughly 4000 deg2 at high Galactic latitudes in Y, J, H and K bands. The survey also included a significant quantity of two epoch J band observations, with an epoch baseline greater than 2 years to calculate proper motions. We present a near-infrared proper motion catalogue for the 1500 deg2 of the two epoch LAS data, which includes 135 625 stellar sources and a further 88 324 with ambiguous morphological classifications, all with motions detected above the 5σ level. We developed a custom proper motion pipeline which we describe here. Our catalogue agrees well with the proper motion data supplied for a 300 deg2 subset in the current Wide Field Camera Science Archive (WSA) 10th data release (DR10) catalogue, and in various optical catalogues, but it benefits from a larger matching radius and hence a larger upper proper motion detection limit. We provide absolute proper motions, using LAS galaxies for the relative to absolute correction. By using local second-order polynomial transformations, as opposed to linear transformations in the WSA, we correct better for any local distortions in the focal plane, not including the radial distortion that is removed by the UKIDSS pipeline. We present the results of proper motion searches for new brown dwarfs and white dwarfs. We discuss 41 sources in the WSA DR10 overlap with our catalogue with proper motions >300 mas yr−1, several of which are new detections. We present 15 new candidate ultracool dwarf binary systems.
The Chemical Composition of Endotoxin Isolated from Intestinal Strain of Desulfovibrio desulfuricans

Desulfovibrio desulfuricans anaerobes are constituents of human alimentary tract microflora. There are suggestions that they take part in the pathogenesis of periodontitis and some gastrointestinal inflammatory disorders, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. Endotoxin is one of Gram-negative bacteria cellular components that influence these microorganisms pathogenicity. Endotoxin is a lipid-polisaccharide heteropolymer consisting of three elements: lipid A, core oligosaccharide, and O-specific polysaccharide, also called antigen-O. The biological activity of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is determined by its structure. In this study, we show that rhamnose, fucose, mannose, glucose, galactose, heptose, and 2-keto-3-deoxyoctulosonic acid (Kdo) are constituents of D. desulfuricans endotoxin oligosaccharide core and O-antigen. Lipid A of these bacteria LPS is composed of glucosamine disaccharide substituted by 3-acyloxyacyl residues: ester-bound 3-(dodecanoyloxy)tetradecanoic, 3-(hexadecanoyloxy)tetradecanoic acid, and amide-bound 3-(tetradecanoyloxy)tetradecanoic acid.
The plague of fantasies

This volume posits that the current epoch is plagued by fantasies. There is an intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of people's lives - whether in the form of digitalization or market relations - and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround people. Traditional critical thought traces the connections between abstract notions and concrete social reality, but today, Zizek suggests, the correct procedure is the inverse: to work from pseudo-concrete imagery towards the abstract. Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian War to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoyment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in whch digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. Slavoj Zizek is the author of "The Sublime Object of Ideology", "For They Know Not What They Do", "Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality" and "The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters".
The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis

The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis adopts an ethnomethodological viewpoint to analyze how the murder of women by a lone gunman at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal was presented to the public via media publication over a two-week period in 1989. All that the public came to know and understand of the murders, the murderer, and the victims was constituted in the description and commentaries produced by the media. What the murders became, therefore, was an expression of the methods used to describe and evaluate them, and central to these methods was membership category analysis -- the human practice of perceiving people, places, and events as "members" of "categories," and to use these to explain actions. This is evident in the various versions comprising the overall story of the Massacre: it was a crime; it was a tragedy; it was a horror story. The killer's story is also based on his own categorial analysis (he said his victims were "feminists"). The media commentators formulated the significance of the murders in categorial terms: it implicated a wider problem, that of violence against women, and thus the reasons for the murders were shown to be categorial matters. As a contribution to sociology, and as a demonstration of the significance of ethnomethodology for understanding social life, the book reveals the methodical and particularly categorial character of how sense is made of events such as this and how such methodical and categorial resources are central to human interaction.
In a Telco-CDN, Pushing Content Makes Sense

The exploding HD video streaming traffic calls for deploying content servers deeper inside network operators' infrastructures. Telco-CDN are new content distribution services that are managed by Internet Service Providers (ISP). Since the network operator controls both the infrastructure and the content delivery overlay, it is in a position to engineer telco-CDN so that networking resources are optimally utilized. In this paper, we show the following two findings: 1. it is possible to implement an efficient algorithm for the placement of video chunks into a telco-CDN. We present an algorithm, which is based on a genetic algorithm implemented on the MapReduce framework. We show that, for a national VoD service, computing a quasi-optimal placement is possible. 2. such push strategy makes sense because it allows to actually take into account fine-grain traffic management strategies on the underlying infrastructure. Our proposal re-opens the debate about the relevance of such "push" approach (where the manager of telco-CDN proactively pushes video content into servers) versus the traditional caching approach (where the content is pulled to the servers from requests of clients). Our proposal of a quasi-optimal tracker enables fair comparisons between both approaches for most traffic engineering policies. We illustrate the interest of our proposal in the context of a major European Telco-CDN with real traces from a popular Video-on-Demand (VoD) service. Our experimental results show that, given a perfect algorithm for predicting user preferences, our placement algorithm is able to keep aligned with LRU caching in terms of the traditional hit-ratio, but the workload on some troubled links (e.g., over-used links) in a push-based strategy is significantly alleviated.
Ketamine as a neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory agent in children undergoing surgery on cardiopulmonary bypass: A pilot randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Objective: Infants are potentially more susceptible to cell death mediated via glutamate excitotoxicity attributed to cardiopulmonary bypass. We hypothesized that ketamine, via N-methyl D-aspartate receptor blockade and anti-inflammatory effects, would reduce central nervous system injury during cardiopulmonary bypass. Methods: We randomized 24 infants, without chromosomal abnormalities, to receive ketamine (2 mg/kg, n = 13) or placebo (saline, n = 11) before cardiopulmonary bypass for repair of ventricular septal defects. Plasma markers of inflammation and central nervous system injury were compared at the end of surgery, and 6, 24, and 48 hrs after surgery. Magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy before cardiopulmonary bypass and at the time of hospital discharge were performed in a subset of cases and controls (n = 5 in each group). Cerebral hemodynamics were monitored postoperatively using near-infrared spectroscopy, and neurodevelopmental outcomes were assessed using Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II before and 2–3 wks after surgery. Results: Statistically significant differences were noted in preoperative inspired oxygen levels, intraoperative cooling and postoperative temperature, respiratory rate, platelet count, and bicarbonate levels. The peak concentration of C-reactive protein was lower in cases compared to controls at 24 hrs (p = .048) and 48 hrs (p = .001). No significant differences were noted in the expression of various cytokines, chemokines, S100, and neuron-specific enolase between the cases and controls. Magnetic resonance imaging with spectroscopy studies showed that ketamine administration led to a significant decrease in choline and glutamate plus glutamine/creatine in frontal white matter. No statistically significant differences occurred between pre- and postoperative Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II scores. Conclusions: We did not find any evidence for neuroprotection or neurotoxicity in our pilot study. A large, adequately powered randomized control trial is needed to discern the central nervous system effect of ketamine on the developing brain. brain. Trial Registration: The trial is registered at www.ClinicalTrials. gov, NCT00556361.
Neurons in the primate orbitofrontal cortex respond to fat texture independently of viscosity.

The primate orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a site of convergence from primary taste, olfactory, and somatosensory cortical areas. We describe the responses of a population of single neurons in the OFC that respond to orally applied fat (e.g., safflower oil) and to substances with a similar texture but different chemical composition, such as mineral oil (hydrocarbon) and silicone oil [(Si(CH3)2O)n]. These findings provide evidence that the neurons respond to the oral texture of fat, sensed by the somatosensory system. Use of an oral viscosity stimulus consisting of carboxymethyl-cellulose in the range 1-10,000 centipoise (cP) showed that the responses of these fat-sensitive neurons are not related to stimulus viscosity. Thus a textural component independent of viscosity and related to the slick or oily property is being used to activate these oral fat-sensitive neurons. Moreover, a separate population of neurons responds to viscosity (produced, e.g., by the carboxymethyl-cellulose series), but not to fat with the same viscosity. Thus there is a dissociation between texture channels used to sense fat viscosity and non-fat-produced viscosity. Further, free fatty acids such as linoleic acid do not activate these neurons, providing further evidence that the oral fat-sensing mechanism through which these OFC neurons are activated is not gustatory but textural. Most of this population of fat-sensitive neurons receive convergent taste inputs. These results provide evidence about how oral fat is sensed and are relevant to understanding the physiological and pathophysiological processes related to fat intake.
Distributed Trajectory Similarity Search

Mobile and sensing devices have already become ubiquitous. They have made tracking moving objects an easy task. As a result, mobile applications like Uber and many IoT projects have generated massive amounts of trajectory data that can no longer be processed by a single machine efficiently. Among the typical query operations over trajectories, similarity search is a common yet expensive operator in querying trajectory data. It is useful for applications in different domains such as traffic and transportation optimizations, weather forecast and modeling, and sports analytics. It is also a fundamental operator for many important mining operations such as clustering and classification of trajectories. In this paper, we propose a distributed query framework to process trajectory similarity search over a large set of trajectories. We have implemented the proposed framework in Spark, a popular distributed data processing engine, by carefully considering different design choices. Our query framework supports both the Hausdorff distance the Frechet distance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the excellent scalability and query efficiency achieved by our design, compared to other methods and design alternatives.
Static WCET analysis of the H.264/AVC decoder exploiting coding information

Multimedia playback programs must satisfy certain hard real-time constraints to give their user a pleasant viewing experience. Having a tight estimation on the worst case execution time (WCET) is essential for the resource scheduler to ensure all the tasks in the system can satisfy their timing requirements while maintaining good system resource utilization. In this paper we present a detailed hybrid WCET analysis of the H.264/AVC reference decoder and demonstrate that the coding information can be used to tighten the pure static WCET estimation up to 70%.
Multi-Granularity Locks in an Object-Oriented Database

Multi-granularity locking is widely accepted today as an important performance booster for concurrency control in relational databases. In this paper, we address the issues that arise in applying the same idea to an object-oriented database. First, with encapsulated implementations providing interfaces to objects, it is both possible and beneecial to deene connict relationships between pairs of operations allowed on objects of a particular class. This, in turn, translates into a need for a rich and extensible set of lock types that can be used at diierent granularities (e.g. object, le, database). Second, objects often participate in multiple collections. Thus, there may be no simple hierarchy of locking granules but rather an arbitrary graph with inclusion and intersection relationships. Moreover, updates to the database could result in modiications to this graph. Thus, this graph becomes a point of potential high contention and care is required to ensure that transactions lock it for the shortest duration possible.
Phosphorylation of STAT-1 Serine 727 Is Prolonged in HLA-B27-Expressing Human Monocytic Cells

A tissue antigen, HLA-B27, is strongly associated with a group of rheumatic diseases called spondyloarthritides. Despite the intensive research, the exact role of HLA-B27 in the pathogenesis of these diseases is still unclear. Here we studied whether HLA-B27 modulates the phosphorylation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 1 (STAT-1) serine 727 residue and the localization of STAT-1 in Salmonella-infected human monocytic cells. In addition, we studied the role of signaling molecule double-stranded RNA activated protein kinase (PKR) in these modulatory effects. U937 human monocytic cell transfectants stably expressing wild type HLA-B27 or mutated HLA-B27 heavy chains with amino acid substitutions in the B pocket were prepared. The PMA-differentiated cells were infected with S. enteritidis. Western blotting was used to detect the phosphorylation of STAT-1, and to visualize the localization of STAT-1 in the cells confocal microscopy was used. Specific inhibitors were employed to study the role of PKR in STAT-1 phosphorylation. We discovered that the phosphorylation of STAT-1 serine 727 is prolonged in cells expressing misfolding forms of HLA-B27 after S. enteritidis infection, whereas in mock cells and in cells expressing mutated, non-misfolding HLA-B27 the phosphorylation of serine 727 is transient. Interestingly, STAT-1 serine 727 phosphorylation is partly dependent on PKR. In addition, more STAT-1 is localized in the nucleus of HLA-B27-expressing cells, even before an external trigger, when compared to mock cells. In conclusion, our results show that the phosphorylation of STAT-1 serine 727 residue is prolonged in HLA-B27-expressing monocyte-macrophage U937 cells after bacterial infection. This is of interest since the phosphorylation of serine 727 on STAT-1 is suggested to contribute to macrophage activation and promote inflammatory responses. Therefore, our results provide a mechanism which explains how the expression of an HLA-B27 molecule can impact the course of Salmonella infection and reactive arthritis.
A Turbo Code Tutorial

| We give a tutorial exposition of turbo codes and the associated algorithms. Included are a simple derivation for the performance of turbo codes, and a straightforward presentation of the iterative decoding algorithm. The derivations of both the performance estimate and the modi ̄ed BCJR decoding algorithm are novel. The treatment is intended to be a launching point for further study in the ̄eld and, signi ̄cantly, to provide su±cient information for the design of computer simulations.
Information Extraction Supported Question Answering

Abstract : This paper discusses the use of our information extraction (IE) system, Textract, in the question-answering (QA) track of the recently held TREC-8 tests. One of our major objectives is to examine how IE can help IR (Information Retrieval) in applications like QA. Our study shows: (1) IE can provide solid support for QA; (2) low-level IE like Named Entity tagging is often a necessary component in handling most types of questions; (3) a robust natural language shallow parser provides a structural basis for handling questions; (4) high-level domain independent IE, i.e. extraction of multiple relationships and general events, is expected to bring about a breakthrough in QA.
Specificity is rarely absolute in coral–algal symbiosis: implications for coral response to climate change

Some reef-building corals have been shown to respond to environmental change by shifting the composition of their algal symbiont (genus Symbiodinium) communities. These shifts have been proposed as a potential mechanism by which corals might survive climate stressors, such as increased temperatures. Conventional molecular methods suggest this adaptive capacity may not be widespread because few (∼25%) coral species have been found to associate with multiple Symbiodinium clades. However, these methods can fail to detect low abundance symbionts (typically less than 10–20% of the total algal symbiont community). To determine whether additional Symbiodinium clades are present, but are not detected using conventional techniques, we applied a high-resolution, real-time PCR assay to survey Symbiodinium (in clades A–D) from 39 species of phylogenetically and geographically diverse scleractinian corals. This survey included 26 coral species thought to be restricted to hosting a single Symbiodinium clade (‘symbiotic specialists’). We detected at least two Symbiodinium clades (C and D) in at least one sample of all 39 coral species tested; all four Symbiodinium clades were detected in over half (54%) of the 26 symbiotic specialist coral species. Furthermore, on average, 68 per cent of all sampled colonies within a given coral species hosted two or more symbiont clades. We conclude that the ability to associate with multiple symbiont clades is common in scleractinian (stony) corals, and that, in coral–algal symbiosis, ‘specificity’ and ‘flexibility’ are relative terms: specificity is rarely absolute. The potential for reef corals to adapt or acclimatize to environmental change via symbiont community shifts may therefore be more phylogenetically widespread than has previously been assumed.
Digital history meets Wikipedia: Analyzing historical persons in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the result of a collaborative effort aiming to represent human knowledge and to make it accessible for everyone. As such it contains lots of contemporary as well as history-related information. This research looks into historical data available in Wikipedia to explore its various time-related characteristics. In particular, we study Wikipedia articles on historical persons. Our analysis sheds new light on the characteristics of information about historical persons in Wikipedia and quantifies user interest in such data. We use signals derived from the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia as well as from article view logs and we overlay them over temporal dimension to understand relations between time, link structure and article popularity. In the latter part of the paper, we also demonstrate different ways for estimating person importance based on the temporal aspects of the link structure.