Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of viral encephalopathy and retinopathy virus (VERV) in wild marine fish species of the South Tyrrhenian Sea (Central Mediterranean).

Keywords: carrier, demersal ﬁsh, piscine nodavirus,RT-PCR, Tyrrhenian Sea.Betanodavirus infection has been reported to causediseases in a wide variety of marine ﬁsh species inaquaculture worldwide, and it is responsible ofsevere economic losses (Gagne et al. 2004; Walker& Winton 2010). Fish nodaviruses more com-monly cause disease and mortality of up to 100%in larval and juvenile stages, although adults canalso be affected (Munday & Nakai 1997; Gagneet al. 2004). Fish surviving infection can becomeasymptomatic carriers. Disease is characterized byabnormal swimming behaviours associated withvacuolar lesions in the nervous tissues containingviral particles. Clinical signs should be ascribed toone single disease, ofﬁcially identiﬁed as viralencephalopathy and retinopathy (VER) also knownas viral nervous necrosis (VNN). The disease, present in the Mediterranean basin,affects farmed species such as European seabass,Dicentrarchus labrax L. , and shi drum, Umbrinacirrosa L. , but also wild species such as duskygrouper, Epinephelus marginatus (Lowe), and whitegrouper, Epinephelus aeneus (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire) (Maltese & Bovo 2007). Nodavirus hasbeen identiﬁed in some wild apparently healthy ﬁshbelonging to the following species: garﬁsh, Belonebelone (L.), bogue, Boops boops (L.), thinlip greymullet, Liza ramada (Risso), whiting, Merlangiusmerlangus (L.), European hake, Merluccius merluc-cius (L.), ﬂathead grey mullet, Mugil cephalus L. ,red mullet, Mullus barbatus barbatus (L.), commonpandora, Pagellus erythrinus (L.), axillary seabream,Pagellus acarne (Risso), black goby, Gobius niger L. ,European pilchard, Sardina pilchardus (Walbaum),gilthead seabream, Sparus aurata L. , tub gurnard,Chelidonichthys lucerna (L.), and poor cod, Trisopte-rus minutus (L.), (Castric et al. 2001; Maltese et al.2005; Ciulli et al. 2006; Grodzki, Galletti & Ciulli2006). This study was aimed at determining the occur-rence of viral encephalopathy and retinopathy virus(VERV) in selected stocks of demersal ﬁsh species.Sampling: The study area is situated betweenCapo Suvero (the Calabrian coast) and Capo SanVito (the North-Western Sicilian coast) in theSouthernmost part of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sam-plings were carried out during a summer trawl sur-vey and were performed with a commercial vesselequipped with an ad hoc designed net, with20 mm of stretched mesh size (Fiorentini et al.1999). A stratiﬁed random sampling method wasadopted (Relini 1998; Bertrand et al. 2002). Atotal of 23 hauls were carried out randomly allo-cated into ﬁve depth strata: A: 10–50 m(622 km
Software-defined load balancer in cloud data centers

Today's Data Centers deploy load balancers to balance the traffic load across multiple servers. Commercial load balancers are highly specialized machines that are located at the front end of a Data Center. When a client request arrives at the Data Center, the load balancer would determine the server to service this client's request. It routes the request to an appropriate server based on the native policies such as round-robin, random or others without considering the traffic state. It is not possible to implement arbitrary polices as load balancers as they are vendor specific. Apart from that, the piece of hardware is expensive and becomes single point of failure. In this paper, we develop a software defined network (SDN) based load balancing architecture with a load-aware policy using OpenFlow switch connected to SDN controller and commodity servers. It is less expensive when compared to the commercial load balancer and has programming flexibility in terms of applying arbitrary polices by writing modules in the SDN controller. With the facility of supporting multiple controller connections in commercially-available OpenFlow switches, the system is robust to single point of controller failures. We develop a prototype implementation of the proposed SDN based load balancer and carry out performance study to demonstrate its effectiveness.
LINEAR CONSTRAINTS IN TWO-VIEW MULTIPLE HOMOGRAPHY ESTIMATION OF UNCALIBRATED SCENES

In this contribution, we present a method for direct linear estimation of multiple homographies and optimization of estimation results by enforcing topological constraints by means of connected components. The applications are the detection of independent moving objects seen by a moving observer and sparse reconstruction of the scene. Security and surveillance applications require day-andnight capability. Therefore thermal cameras are the preferred sensors. These sensors violate primary constraints for the estimation of the optical flow. The motion of the sensor is compensated by image stabilization, which allows us to utilize results from the extensive field of change detection, for example, background subtraction and temporal differences. We assume that the scene can be approximated by a composition of several planes. Each plane induces an independent homography for each image pair. A set of homographies for one image pair is called consistent if and only if all homographies refer to the same relative orientation but even though they may refer to different 3d-planes. We show that linear constraints can be induced to homography estimation to ensure consistency within a pair of views. The fundamental matrix allows us to formulate a solution independent of the calibration of the camera. Given a set of consistent homographies and a corresponding image segmentation for an image pair it is possible to improve the image stabilization by local warping instead of warping with one single homography. This approach is explored by experiments on disparity map estimation based on the homography estimation on the Middlebury-Stereo Benchmark dataset. Additionally, the robustness of the algorithm is explored using a synthetic scene. Finally we show first results of motion detection based on this method combined with temporal differences.
Control and Cybernetics a Generalized Varying-domain Optimization Method for Fuzzy Goal Programming with Priorities Based on a Genetic Algorithm

This paper proposes a generalized domain optimization method for fuzzy goal programming with different priorities. According to the three possible styles of the objective function, the domain optimization method and its generalization are correspondingly proposed. This method can generate the results consistent with the decision-maker's priority expectations, according to which the goal with higher priority may have higher level of satisfaction. However, the reformulated optimization problem may be nonconvex for the reason of the nature of the original problem and the introduction of the varying-domain optimization method. It is possible to obtain a local optimal solution for nonconvex programming by the SQP algorithm. In order to get the global solution of the new programming problem, the co-evolutionary genetic algorithm, called GENOCOP III, is used instead of the SQP method. In this way the decision-maker can get the optimum of the optimization problem. We demonstrate the power of this proposed method based on genetic algorithm by illustrative examples.
Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction Based on Modified Robust Independent Component Analysis

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) separation gets widely attention due to its clinical significance. In the paper, we proposed an improved robust independent component analysis for fetal ECG separation. Firstly, wavelet decomposition was applied to fetal ECG to get the relevant parameters. Then, the RobustICA was used to separate the mixed signals. Compared to robust independent component analysis, computing speed of the improved algorithm increased by an average of 15 percent while minimum mean square error fluctuations 0.0008, which indicated that this algorithm could be effectively used in clinical fetal ECG monitoring.
Aggressive Responses to Troubled Situations in a Sample of Adolescents: A Three-Mode Approach

We developed a questionnaire for measuring aggressive behavios, which was administered to a sample of 318 adolescents. The questionnaire consisted of six situations (three related to unknown people and three related to relatives) and seven possible behaviors (related to physical and verbal aggression and to anger). The corresponding person × situation × response data were analyzed using a three-mode component analysis. Furthermore, 127 participants also completed standard questionnaires related to aggressive behavior and impulsivity. Results showed the expected two latent dimensions for situations and three latent dimensions for responses were appropriate. In addition we found five latent dimensions for persons. The relationships between these five dimensions and standard questionnaires of aggression and impulsivity are discussed. En el presente estudio desarrollamos un cuestionario para evaluar las conductas agresivas que fue administrado a una muestra de 318 adolescentes. El cuestionario estaba formado por seis situaciones (tres relacionadas con desconocidos y tres con familiares) y siete posibles comportamientos (relacionados con agresividad física, verbal o ira). Los datos así obtenidos fueron analizados utilizando análisis de componentes principales de tres vías. 127 participantes además completaron cuestionarios tradicionales relacionados con agresividad e impulsividad. Los resultados mostraron las dos dimensiones esperadas de situación y las tres de respuesta. Finalmente se obtuvieron cinco dimensiones latentes de individuo que fueron relacionadas con los cuestionarios tradicionales de agresividad e impulsividad.
Randomized phase II study of irinotecan, leucovorin and 5-fluorouracil (ILF) versus cisplatin plus ILF (PILF) combination chemotherapy for advanced gastric cancer.

BACKGROUND Irinotecan, in combination with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) or cisplatin, has demonstrated efficacy against advanced gastric cancer (AGC). PATIENTS AND METHODS Chemotherapy-naive AGC patients were randomly assigned to receive irinotecan 150 mg/m(2) on day 1, leucovorin 20 mg/m(2) and a 22-h infusion of 5-FU 1000 mg/m(2) on days 1 and 2 (ILF) or ILF plus cisplatin 30 mg/m(2) on day 2 (PILF). Treatment was repeated every 2 weeks. RESULTS Of 91 registered patients, 45 patients were treated with ILF and 45 with PILF. For both arms, 687 chemotherapy cycles were delivered (median = 7 for ILF and 8 for PILF). Both ILF and PILF were generally well tolerated and there was no relevant difference in the occurrence of overall grade 3/4 toxic effects between the two arms. Four patients died during treatment: one in the ILF and three in the PILF arm. The objective response rate was 42% for both arms. There was no significant difference in therapeutic efficacy between ILF and PILF with respect to progression-free survival (4.8 versus 6.2 months; P = 0.523) and overall survival (10.7 versus 10.5 months; P = 0.850). CONCLUSION Both ILF and PILF are active as first-line chemotherapy for AGC. The addition of cisplatin, however, has no clear advantage over ILF.
Childhood maltreatment is associated with an automatic negative emotion processing bias in the amygdala

Major depression has been repeatedly associated with amygdala hyper‐responsiveness to negative (but not positive) facial expressions at early, automatic stages of emotion processing using subliminally presented stimuli. However, it is not clear whether this “limbic bias” is a correlate of depression or represents a vulnerability marker preceding the onset of the disease. Because childhood maltreatment is a potent risk factor for the development of major depression in later life, we explored whether childhood maltreatment is associated with amygdalar emotion processing bias in maltreated but healthy subjects. Amygdala responsiveness to subliminally presented sad and happy faces was measured by means of fMRI at 3 T in N = 150 healthy subjects carefully screened for psychiatric disorders. Childhood maltreatment was assessed by the 25‐item childhood trauma questionnaire (CTQ). A strong association of CTQ‐scores with amygdala responsiveness to sad, but not happy facial expressions emerged. This result was further qualified by an interaction of emotional valence and CTQ‐scores and was not confounded by trait anxiety, current depression level, age, gender, intelligence, education level, and more recent stressful life‐events. Childhood maltreatment is apparently associated with detectable changes in amygdala function during early stages of emotion processing which resemble findings described in major depression. Limbic hyper‐responsiveness to negative facial cues could be a consequence of the experience of maltreatment during childhood increasing the risk of depression in later life. Limitation: the present association of limbic bias and maltreatment was demonstrated in the absence of psychopathological abnormalities, thereby limiting strong conclusions. Hum Brain Mapp 34:2899–2909, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Linguistics in a Primary School

Introduction In this chapter, I discuss a linguistics course that I taught for about three years in a multi-age primary school classroom and how what started as a simple “guest spot” in a school evolved into a bigger project with broader applications. I demonstrate ways in which I, along with the primary teachers, integrated linguistics into the curriculum (into language arts, social studies, science, and even a bit into math). It has long been recognized that K-12 teachers can benefit from linguistic knowledge. Linguists in the US began to recognize the importance of some of the findings of their field to K-12 education in the 1960s and 1970s, which led to several projects designed to determine which aspects of linguistics might be best incorporated into K-12 curriculum and how to undertake that incorporation. O'Neil (Chapter 2 in this volume) describes a 1962 US Office of Education project, strongly supported by the National Council of Teachers, called Project English. Keyser (1970) offers lesson plans that were part of a Massachusetts Department of Education project to integrate linguistics into K-12 curricula. Though these projects came to an end for various reasons, discussed elsewhere in this volume, a handful of linguists have continued to work at incorporating linguistics into K-12 classrooms. More recently, Chomsky et al. (1985), Fabb (1985), Goodluck (1991), Honda (1994), Wolfram (1997), and Reaser and Wolfram (2005) have all demonstrated that linguistics activities are successful and beneficial in K-12 education.
mTrend: discovery of topic movements on geo-microblogging messages

With being coupled with geographic location, microblogging messages have become more important information resources to share observations and opinions about the real world via social media. As a result, we are getting much interested in comprehending situations related to natural and/or social events using those messages. In the recent, certain works have focused on showing trending topics that can represent snapshots of certain situations with spatial and temporal contexts on the basis of geo-tagged microblogging messages. They, however, have difficulty in tracking and comparing topic changes and movements in a spatiotemporal domain because of the separated geo-spatial and temporal components. This demonstration introduces mTrend, which constructs and visualizes spatiotemporal trends of topics, named as "topic movements", on the basis of the geo-tagged Tweets. In particular, its interactive visual mining tool allows users to intuitively understand the differences between topic movements over space and time. In the demonstration, we present the comparisons of topic movements using a few keywords related to the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Intrathecal vs. intramuscular administration of human antitetanus immunoglobulin or equine tetanus antitoxin in the treatment of tetanus: a meta‐analysis

Background Mortality caused by tetanus is still a serious health problem in developing countries. Apart from immunization, early treatment with equine antitetanus serum (ATS) or human tetanus immunoglobulin (TIG) is the real treatment that can avoid death. On pathophysiological grounds intrathecal administration would be preferred because of high concentrations of the antiserum in cerebrospinal fluid and thus around the nerve roots. Many studies concluded on its effectiveness whereas others did not find any superiority of this method. However, most of those studies were not random and/or had no sufficient weight.
tranSticks: physically manipulatable virtual connections

A virtually connected medium called tranStick is described that functions both as a "virtual wire" and as a "memory card" containing a shared space. A user can connect two networked devices by simply placing one of a pair of tranSticks with the same identifier into each device. The tranSticks provide feedback indicating that the devices are connected; the connection to be closed or changed in the same way it would be if the devices were connected by a physical cable. A user can also access to a shared space on a network as if the space were in the tranStick. Since tranSticks contain long secret keys, the process of finding another tranStick with the same identifier can be encrypted. The tranStick approach differs from other approaches in that it provides feedback from the connection as well as serving as a medium for establishing a connection, and it enables disconnection and switchover to be done intuitively because the operations are reversible.
Dextran-Catechin: An anticancer chemically-modified natural compound targeting copper that attenuates neuroblastoma growth

Neuroblastoma is frequently diagnosed at advanced stage disease and treatment includes high dose chemotherapy and surgery. Despite the use of aggressive therapy survival rates are poor and children that survive their disease experience long term side effects from their treatment, highlighting the need for effective and less toxic therapies. Catechin is a natural polyphenol with anti-cancer properties and limited side effects, however its mechanism of action is unknown. Here we report that Dextran-Catechin, a conjugated form of catechin that increases serum stability, is preferentially and markedly active against neuroblastoma cells having high levels of intracellular copper, without affecting non-malignant cells. Copper transporter 1 (CTR1) is the main transporter of copper in mammalian cells and it is upregulated in neuroblastoma. Functional studies showed that depletion of CTR1 expression reduced intracellular copper levels and led to a decrease in neuroblastoma cell sensitivity to Dextran-Catechin, implicating copper in the activity of this compound. Mechanistically, Dextran-Catechin was found to react with copper, inducing oxidative stress and decreasing glutathione levels, an intracellular antioxidant and regulator of copper homeostasis. In vivo, Dextran-Catechin significantly attenuated tumour growth in human xenograft and syngeneic models of neuroblastoma. Thus, Dextran-Catechin targets copper, inhibits tumour growth, and may be valuable in the treatment of aggressive neuroblastoma and other cancers dependent on copper for their growth.
First determination of the dynamical mass of a binary L dwarf

We present here the results of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic observations leading to the determination of the orbit and dynamical masses of the binary L dwarf 2MASSW J0746425+2000321. High angular resolution observations spread over almost 4 years and obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), and at heW. M. Keck Observatory (Keck) allow us to cover ∼36% of the period, corresponding to 60% of the orbit, and, for the first time, to derive a precise estimate of the total and individual masses of such a late-type object. We find an orbital period of 3850.9 +904 −767 days. The corresponding total mass is 0.146 +0.016 −0.006 Mwith uncertainties depending on the distance. Spatially resolved low resolution optical (550-1025 nm) spectra have been obtained with HST/STIS, allowing us to measure the spectral types of the two components (L0 ± 0.5 for the primary and L1.5 ± 0.5 for the secondary). We also present precise photometry of the individual components measured on the high angular resolution images obtained with HST/ACS and WFPC2 (visible), VLT/NACO (J, H and KS bands) and Keck I (KS band). These spectral and photometric measurements enable us to estimate their effective temperatures and mass ratio, and to place the object accurately in a H-R diagram. The binary system is most likely formed by a primary with a mass of 0.085 ± 0.010 Mand a secondary with a mass of 0.066 ± 0.006 M� , thus clearly substellar, for an age of approximately 300 ± 150 Myr. Hα variability indicates chromospheric and/or magnetic activity.
Analysis of nonlinearity in normal and epileptic EEG signals

The nonlinearity in normal and epileptic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is investigated in this paper by the delay vector variance (DVV) method, which determines the degree of nonlinearity of the tested time series by comparing the target variances of the tested time series to those of the corresponding surrogate time series. The results of numerical experiments show that both normal and epileptic EEG signals are of nonlinearity, whereas epileptic EEG signals are of higher degree of nonlinearity than normal EEG signals. Based on this, it is proposed that degree of nonlinearity could provide useful information for epileptic seizure characterization. Moreover, the degree of nonlinearity of epileptic EEG time series fluctuates more briskly than that of normal EEG time series.
S Phase Progression in Human Cells Is Dictated by the Genetic Continuity of DNA Foci

DNA synthesis must be performed with extreme precision to maintain genomic integrity. In mammalian cells, different genomic regions are replicated at defined times, perhaps to preserve epigenetic information and cell differentiation status. However, the molecular principles that define this S phase program are unknown. By analyzing replication foci within discrete chromosome territories during interphase, we show that foci which are active during consecutive intervals of S phase are maintained as spatially adjacent neighbors throughout the cell cycle. Using extended DNA fibers, we demonstrate that this spatial continuity of replication foci correlates with the genetic continuity of adjacent replicon clusters along chromosomes. Finally, we used bioinformatic tools to compare the structure of DNA foci with DNA domains that are seen to replicate during discrete time intervals of S phase using genome-wide strategies. Data presented show that a major mechanism of S phase progression involves the sequential synthesis of regions of the genome because of their genetic continuity along the chromosomal fiber.
Electrical Behavior of High Density Polyethylene/ZnO Nano-composites

Abstract High density polyethylene (HDPE)/ZnO composites containing a wide range of ZnO content (1-60 vol%) were prepared by melt compounding. ZnO powders with sizes of ~ 200 nm and ~ 2 μm were employed as reinforcing fillers. The effects of the size and filler particle content as well as annealing treatment on the dielectric and conducting properties of the HDPE/ZnO composites were examined. The results showed that the dielectric constant of HDPE/ZnO composites increased gradually with an increase of the ZnO content. The resistivity of HDPE/ZnO composites can be described satisfactorily by the interparticle distance of filled particles. This behavior is interpreted in terms of tunneling of the electrons through the insulating layer of polymer separating two neighboring ZnO fillers. The correlation between the structure and electrical property of the composites is discussed.