Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dispersal Ecology of Insects Inhabiting Wood-Decaying Fungi

Abstract Distribution patterns of several threatened wood-living insects indicate that they are poor dispersers, but few studies have directly investigated their dispersal ability. Therefore, I have studied key aspects of the dispersal ecology of wood-living insects, focusing on beetles inhabiting fruiting bodies of the wood-decaying fungi Fomes fometarius and Fomitopsis pinicola. The genetic structures of the threatened tenebrionid beetle Oplocephala haemorrhoidalis and its common relative Bolitophagus reticulatus were studied using RAPD and allozyme genetic markers. We found higher levels of genetic differentiation in O. haemorrhoidalis than in B. reticulatus, suggesting that levels of gene flow between populations are lower in the former species, but the level of genetic variability was not particularly low in either of them. The colonisation abilities of O. haemorrhoidalis and B. reticulatus were studied by comparing a number of life history traits in the two species. Bolitophagus reticulatus was found to have a higher proportion of individuals with developed flight muscles than O. haemorrhoidalis, a greater willingness to take-off, and its females had more (but smaller) eggs in their abdomens. Oplocephala haemorrhoidalis tended to make few flights of long duration, whereas B. reticulatus made shorter but more numerous flights. However, both species were able to cover several kilometres in flight. I suggest that B. reticulatus possesses a suite of life history traits that make it better adapted than O. haemorrhoidalis to exploit the scattered trees with fruiting bodies present in managed forests. To succeed with colonisation, insects that disperse before mating must find mates at their new habitats. In a field experiment, we studied whether representatives of the beetle genera Cis (Cisidae) and Dorcatoma (Anobiidae) utilise long-range pheromones to locate mates. Two strategies for finding mates were identified. In Cis both sexes were attracted by the odour of their host fungus, but in Dorcatoma only females were attracted by host odour while males were attracted by a sexual pheromone released by the female. The efficiency of the two mate-finding strategies was compared with a simulation model. Very small differences in effectiveness between the strategies were found at high relative densities of insects. However, the pheromone strategy (used by Dorcatoma) became relatively more efficient when the relative density of insects and the density of substrate decreased. Thus, species using the non-pheromone strategy of mate-finding (like Cisidae) are probably more sensitive to habitat fragmentation and are likely to experience Allee effects at higher population densities.
Stability and optimization of DNS-based request redirection in CDNs

Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions have been progressively integrated to many network infrastructures. However, they show technological limitations when dealing with an increasing number of bandwidth-hungry and demanding applications. One of the most effective ways to improve the performance of a CDN is to efficiently manage its traffic by implementing relevant request routing solutions. To this end, we present in this paper a flexible scheme and an optimization algorithm, based on Lyapunov theory, for request routing in CDNs. Our online approach provides a stable quality of service to clients, while improving content delivery delays. It also reduces data transport costs for operators and outperforms existing techniques in terms of peak traffic management.
Rotavirus genotypes in children in the community with diarrhea in Madagascar

In the context of the possible introduction of a preventive vaccine against rotaviruses in Madagascar, the G and P genotypes distribution of the rotaviruses circulating in the children in Madagascar was studied, and the presence of emerging genotypes and unusual strains were assessed. From February 2008 to May 2009, 1,679 stools specimens were collected from children ≤5 years old with diarrhea. ELISA was used for antigen detection, and molecular amplification of VP7 and VP4 gene fragments was used for genotyping. Rotavirus antigen was detected in 104 samples (6.2%). Partial sequences of VP7 and VP4 genes were obtained from 81 and 80 antigen‐positive stools, respectively. The most frequent G and P types combinations detected were G9P[8] (n = 51; 64.6%), followed by G1P[8] (n = 15; 18.9%), and G1P[6] (n = 8; 10.1%). A few unusual G‐P combinations, such as G4P[6] (n = 3; 3.8%), G9P[6] (n = 1; 1.3%), and G3P[9] reassortant feline human virus (n = 1; 1.3%) were identified. Both VP4 and VP7 sequences in one of the three G4P[6] isolates were closely related to those in porcine strains, and one was a reassortant human porcine virus. These findings give an overview of the strains circulating in Madagascar and should help public health authorities to define a vaccine strategy. J. Med. Virol. 85:1652–1660, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Cross-platform heterogeneous runtime environment

of the Dissertation Cross-Platform Heterogeneous Runtime Environment by Enqiang Sun Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering Northeastern University, April 2016 Dr. David Kaeli, Adviser Heterogeneous platforms are becoming widely adopted thanks to the support from new programming languages and models. Among these languages/models, OpenCL is an industry standard for parallel programming on heterogeneous devices. With OpenCL, compute-intensive portions of an application can be offloaded to a variety of processing units on a system. OpenCL is one of the first standards that focuses on portability, allowing programs to be written once and run unmodified on multiple, heterogeneous devices, regardless of vendor. While OpenCL has been widely adopted, there still remains a lack of support for automatic workload balancing and data consistency when multiple devices are present in the system. To address this need, we have designed a cross-platform heterogeneous runtime environment which provides a high-level, unified, execution model that is coupled with an intelligent resource management facility. The main motivation for developing this runtime environment is to provide OpenCL programmers with a convenient programming paradigm to fully utilize all possible devices in a system and incorporate flexible workload balancing schemes without compromising the user’s ability to assign tasks according to the data affinity. Our work removes much of the cumbersome initialization of the platform, and now devices and related OpenCL objects are hidden under the hood. Equipped with this new runtime environment and associated programming interface, the programmer can focus on designing the application and worry less about customization to the target platform. Further, the programmer can now take advantage of multiple devices using a dynamic workload balancing algorithm to reap the benefits of task-level parallelism. To demonstrate the value of this cross-platform heterogeneous runtime environment, we have evaluated it running both micro benchmarks and popular OpenCL benchmark applications. With minimal overhead of managing data objects across devices, we show that we can achieve scalable performance and application speedup as we increase the number of computing devices, without any changes to the program source code.
An Optimized Apriori Algorithm Based on Sparse Matrix for Intrusion Detection

The original Apriori algorithm is widely used in the intrusion detection field, but it may consume incredible computing resources in the process of handling network packets. We propose our optimized-Apriori algorithm which can greatly improves the algorithm efficiency by means of reducing the data storage space and the number of frequent item sets. We take full advantage of the characteristics of sparse matrix to save storage space and shorten the running time. The experimental results show that our optimized-Apriori algorithm can make a larger progress in saving the storage space of network data to be processed, even shortening nearly half of the data mining time in the process of intrusion detection.
Polymeric Thin Films That Resist the Adsorption of Proteins and the Adhesion of Bacteria

This paper describes the design and preparation of thin polymeric films that resist the adsorption of proteins and the adhesion of bacteria to an extent comparable to, or better than, self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) that present tri(ethylene glycol) groups. These polymeric films were prepared by the reaction of a polyamine, for example, poly(ethylenimine), with a SAM that presented interchain carboxylic anhydride groups, and by the subsequent conversion of the amino groups of the polymer to amido groups on reaction with acyl chlorides. Polyamines functionalized with acetyl chloride produced films that resisted the adsorption of protein and the adhesion of bacteria to a useful extent. Functionalization of the polyamine with acyl chlorides that were derivatives of oligo(ethylene glycol) resulted in films that were 1−10 times more resistant than those obtained by acetylation. The removal of hydrogen bond donor groups from the surface of the polyamines upon acylation seems to be important for the generation .
Recursive programs in normal form (short paper)

Recursive programs can now be expressed as normal forms within some rewriting systems, including traditional combinatory logic, a new variant of lambda-calculus called closure calculus, and recent variants of combinatory logic that support queries of internal program structure. In all these settings, partial evaluation of primitive recursive functions, such as addition, can reduce open terms to normal form without fear of non-termination. In those calculi where queries of program structure are supported, program optimisations that are expressed as non-standard rewriting rules can be represented as functions in the calculus, without any need for quotation or other meta-theory.
Bevacizumab treatment for vestibular schwannomas in neurofibromatosis type two: report of two cases, including responses after prior gamma knife and vascular endothelial growth factor inhibition therapy.

OBJECTIVES Vestibular schwannomas are the hallmark of neurofibromatosis type two. They are difficult to treat, due to their bilateral presentation and the quest for hearing preservation. Our report describes a new treatment approach in this clinical scenario. CASE REPORT We report two cases which confirm that bevacizumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting vascular endothelial growth factor, causes regression of vestibular schwannomas in patients with a previous history of gamma knife radiosurgery or failed treatment with another form of vascular endothelial growth factor targeted therapy. CONCLUSION In 2009, Plotkin et al. reported the volumetric response of vestibular schwannomas to bevacizumab treatment, both in untreated patients and in patients previously treated with erlotinib, an epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitor. The presented cases support the use of bevacizumab to treat vestibular schwannomas. Given the extremely slow growth of these tumours, we note the rapidity of volume reduction following bevacizumab therapy.
The creation of a university system

Preface. The Creation of the British University System: Michael Shattock (University of Warwick). Part I: There is no University a Systema in Britain: . 1. The Universities and the Government: Ernest Simon. 2. A Historical Document: Statement by the Committee of Vice--Chancellors and Principals 1946: Editorial. 3. Student Numbers 1911 to 1971: Ernest Simon. 4. University Admissions: Report of an Inquiry: R. K. Kelsall. 5. British Universities and Intellectual Life: A. H. Halsey. 6. The Growth of Higher Education: S. Zuckerman. 7. Too Few Academic Eggs: B. V. Bowden. 8. Observations on the American University: Edward Shils. Part II: Robbins and After: . 9. First Reactions to the Robbins Report: Charles Morris. 10. The Academic Hierarchy: Robbins, Appendix Three: A. H. Halsey. 11. A Question of Size and Shape: Martin Trow. 12. Review of the Uses of the University : Charles Morris. 13. Notes on New Univerisities: British and American: David Riesman. 14. Dualism in Higher Education: Peter Venables. 15. The Education of Ministers of State: Alec Merrison. Part III: The Assertion of State Control: . 16. University Financing 1979--86: Peter Moore. 17. Academic Standards and Mass Higher Education: Martin Trow. 18. Policy on Higher Education and Research: Peter Swinnerton--Dyer. 19. Elegant and Democratic Values: Will the New English Universities Gel: Christopher Price. 20. Reflections on the British Government and Higher Education: Richard Bird. 21. The White Paper -- Higher Education: A New Framework: Editorial.
Ezh2 restricts the smooth muscle lineage during mouse lung mesothelial development

During development, the lung mesoderm generates a variety of cell lineages, including airway and vascular smooth muscle. Epigenetic changes in adult lung mesodermal lineages are thought to contribute towards diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, although the factors that regulate early lung mesoderm development are unknown. We show in mouse that the PRC2 component Ezh2 is required to restrict smooth muscle differentiation in the developing lung mesothelium. Mesodermal loss of Ezh2 leads to the formation of ectopic smooth muscle in the submesothelial region of the developing lung mesoderm. Loss of Ezh2 specifically in the developing mesothelium reveals a mesothelial cell-autonomous role for Ezh2 in repression of the smooth muscle differentiation program. Loss of Ezh2 derepresses expression of myocardin and Tbx18, which are important regulators of smooth muscle differentiation from the mesothelium and related cell lineages. Together, these findings uncover an Ezh2-dependent mechanism to restrict the smooth muscle gene expression program in the developing mesothelium and allow appropriate cell fate decisions to occur in this multipotent mesoderm lineage. Summary: The PRC component Ezh2 acts cell-autonomously in the developing mouse lung mesothelium to repress smooth muscle differentiation and allow appropriate cell fate decisions to occur.
Protein function prediction via graph kernels

MOTIVATION Computational approaches to protein function prediction infer protein function by finding proteins with similar sequence, structure, surface clefts, chemical properties, amino acid motifs, interaction partners or phylogenetic profiles. We present a new approach that combines sequential, structural and chemical information into one graph model of proteins. We predict functional class membership of enzymes and non-enzymes using graph kernels and support vector machine classification on these protein graphs. RESULTS Our graph model, derivable from protein sequence and structure only, is competitive with vector models that require additional protein information, such as the size of surface pockets. If we include this extra information into our graph model, our classifier yields significantly higher accuracy levels than the vector models. Hyperkernels allow us to select and to optimally combine the most relevant node attributes in our protein graphs. We have laid the foundation for a protein function prediction system that integrates protein information from various sources efficiently and effectively. AVAILABILITY More information available via www.dbs. ifi.lmu. de/Mitarbeiter/borgwardt.html.
Failure Prediction of Jobs in Compute Clouds: A Google Cluster Case Study

Most cloud computing clusters are built from unreliable, commercial off-the-shelf components. The high failure rates in their hardware and software components result in frequent node and application failures. Therefore, it is important to predict application failures before they occur to avoid resource wastage. In this paper, we investigate how to identify application failures based on resource usage measurements from the Google cluster traces. We apply recurrent neural networks to the resource usage measures, and generate features to categorize the input resource usage time series into different classes. Our results show that the model is able to predict failures of batch applications, which are the dominant jobs in the Google cluster. Moreover, we explore early classification to identify failures, and find that the prediction algorithm provides the cloud system enough time to take proactive actions much earlier than the termination of applications, with an average 6% to 10% of resource savings.
Atg5-Independent Sequestration of Ubiquitinated Mycobacteria

Like several other intracellular pathogens, Mycobacterium marinum (Mm) escapes from phagosomes into the host cytosol where it can polymerize actin, leading to motility that promotes spread to neighboring cells. However, only ∼25% of internalized Mm form actin tails, and the fate of the remaining bacteria has been unknown. Here we show that cytosolic access results in a new and intricate host pathogen interaction: host macrophages ubiquitinate Mm, while Mm shed their ubiquitinated cell walls. Phagosomal escape and ubiquitination of Mm occured rapidly, prior to 3.5 hours post infection; at the same time, ubiquitinated Mm cell wall material mixed with host-derived dense membrane networks appeared in close proximity to cytosolic bacteria, suggesting cell wall shedding and association with remnants of the lysed phagosome. At 24 hours post-infection, Mm that polymerized actin were not ubiquitinated, whereas ubiquitinated Mm were found within LAMP-1–positive vacuoles resembling lysosomes. Though double membranes were observed which sequestered Mm away from the cytosol, targeting of Mm to the LAMP-1–positive vacuoles was independent of classical autophagy, as demonstrated by absence of LC3 association and by Atg5-independence of their formation. Further, ubiquitination and LAMP-1 association did not occur with mutant avirulent Mm lacking ESX-1 (type VII) secretion, which fail to escape the primary phagosome; apart from its function in phagosome escape, ESX-1 was not directly required for Mm ubiquitination in macrophages or in vitro. These data suggest that virulent Mm follow two distinct paths in the cytosol of infected host cells: bacterial ubiquitination is followed by sequestration into lysosome-like organelles via an autophagy-independent pathway, while cell wall shedding may allow escape from this fate to permit continued residence in the cytosol and formation of actin tails.
Runtime Enforcement of Memory Safety for the C Programming Language

Memory access violations are a leading source of unreliability in C programs. Although the low-level features of the C programming language, like unchecked pointer arithmetic and explicit memory management, make it a desirable language for many programming tasks, their use often results in hard-to-detect memory errors. As evidence of this problem, a variety of methods exist for retrofitting C with software checks to detect memory errors at runtime. However, these techniques generally suffer from one or more practical drawbacks that have thus far limited their adoption. These weaknesses include the inability to detect all spatial and temporal violations, the use of incompatible metadata, the need for manual code modifications, and the tremendous runtime cost of providing complete safety. This dissertation introduces MemSafe, a compiler analysis and transformation for ensuring the memory safety of C programs at runtime while avoiding the above drawbacks. MemSafe makes several novel contributions that improve upon previous work and lower the runtime cost of achieving memory safety. These include (1) a method for modeling temporal errors as spatial errors, (2) a hybrid metadata representation that combines the most salient features of both object- and pointer-based approaches, and (3) a data-flow representation that simplifies optimizations for removing unneeded checks and unused metadata. Experimental results indicate that MemSafe is capable of detecting memory safety violations in real-world programs with lower runtime overhead than previous methods. Results show that MemSafe detects all known memory errors in multiple versions of two large and widely-used open source applications as well as six programs from a benchmark suite specifically designed for the evaluation of error detection tools. MemSafe enforces complete safety with an average overhead of 88% on 30 widely-used performance evaluation benchmarks. In comparison with previous work, MemSafe's average runtime overhead for one common benchmark suite (29%) is a fraction of that associated with the previous technique (133%) that, until now, had the lowest overhead among all existing complete and automatic methods that are capable of detecting both spatial and temporal violations.
Mendelian randomization as applied to coronary heart disease, including recent advances incorporating new technology.

What is Mendelian Randomization? The field of epidemiology has struggled to make headway in determining whether exposures are causal factors for complex diseases, largely because of the problems of confounding, reverse causation, and bias. To overcome the problems inherent in observational studies, epidemiologists have proposed using genetic variants as proxies for exposures.1,2 The idea is to exploit genetic variants that influence exposure propensity or are involved in metabolism, transport, or cellular uptake of the exposure or are otherwise associated with exposure levels. The advantage of using genetic variants is that because of the random assignment of alleles with respect to subsequent lifestyle factors, they are considered independent of factors that may confound epidemiological studies (see limitations of Mendelian randomization in the next section). Thus, Mendelian randomization combines the 2 fields of epidemiology and genetics, but rather than aiming to understand genetic mechanisms leading to disease, the principle is to use a genetic variant as a proxy for an environmental exposure or intermediate phenotype that may be on the causal pathway of the disease in question. This method is not without problems; however, advances in genetics are helping to overcome these limitations and are likely to increase its utility in uncovering risk factors for disease.
Autonomous WiFi-relay control with mobile robots

Stable communication plays an important role in autonomous applications with mobile robots, especially in the environments without communication infrastructures. There are high demands for quickly building wireless communication network for robots. To ensure stable wireless communication, the bottleneck of the data transmission is needed eliminating to make the communication ability best amongst base station, mobile robots and clients. The paper proposes an efficient approach to address the problem, by equipping WiFi routers on robots to enable and enhance communication ability. Two WiFi models are first introduced to assist the navigation of relay robots. A visual-laser SLAM is proposed to build the environmental map and further localize the relay robots. The RRT-based motion planning method is utilized to find the relay locations with best communication ability. The mobile relay robots are then controlled automatically to the corresponding target locations, setting up ad-hoc wireless network with good quality. Finally, experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.