Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continental and Analytic lenses in relation to the communicative action paradigm: Reconstructive thoughts

This essay develops the idea that Analytic and Continental orientations to political theory are best comprehended not as mortal enemies, but rather as alternative lenses that, together, allow us to better perceive a broader range of significant aspects of political life than is possible by adhering to only one of these approaches. This claim is fleshed out by an analysis of the communicative action paradigm developed by Jürgen Habermas. If this paradigm is revised somewhat in order to make it less dominated by the ideal of consensuality, it can then be taken to be quite attractive in the way it perceptively deploys these two lenses.
An Investigation into Spike-Based Neuromorphic Approaches for Artificial Olfactory Systems

The implementation of neuromorphic methods has delivered promising results for vision and auditory sensors. These methods focus on mimicking the neuro-biological architecture to generate and process spike-based information with minimal power consumption. With increasing interest in developing low-power and robust chemical sensors, the application of neuromorphic engineering concepts for electronic noses has provided an impetus for research focusing on improving these instruments. While conventional e-noses apply computationally expensive and power-consuming data-processing strategies, neuromorphic olfactory sensors implement the biological olfaction principles found in humans and insects to simplify the handling of multivariate sensory data by generating and processing spike-based information. Over the last decade, research on neuromorphic olfaction has established the capability of these sensors to tackle problems that plague the current e-nose implementations such as drift, response time, portability, power consumption and size. This article brings together the key contributions in neuromorphic olfaction and identifies future research directions to develop near-real-time olfactory sensors that can be implemented for a range of applications such as biosecurity and environmental monitoring. Furthermore, we aim to expose the computational parallels between neuromorphic olfaction and gustation for future research focusing on the correlation of these senses.
Clovamide and Flavonoids from Leaves of Trifolium pratense and T. pratense subsp. nivale Grown in Italy

The phenolic content and composition in leaves of Trifolium pratense (red clover) and T. pratense subsp. nivale (snow clover) grown in Italy were evaluated by means of ultraperformance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled with photodiode array and mass spectrometry detectors. Compound identification was based on UV and MS data comparing results with those of reference compounds. Quantitative evaluation of all detected compounds was based on calibration curves obtained with available standards. Several phenolics were identified in both extracts, including clovamide, flavonols and isoflavones as their glycosilated and malonated derivatives. The total phenolic content was higher in red clover (53.7 ± 2.2 mg/g dry weight) than in snow clover (44.4 ± 4.9 mg/g dry weight). Red clover contained higher amounts of clovamide and isoflavones (15.6 ± 0.6 and 24.6 ± 1.6 mg/g dry weight, respectively) than snow clover (8.2 ± 0.1 mg/g and 16.9 ± 0.4 mg/g dry weight, respectively), while flavonols were quantified almost in the same amount in both extracts (13.2 ± 0.6 mg/g and 15.8 ± 0.6 mg/g dry weight in red clover and snow clover, respectively). Red clover was characterized by the presence of quercetin, formononetin and biochanin A derivatives as the most abundant flavonoids, whereas snow clover was characterized by higher amounts of quercetin and prunetin derivatives. This investigation, conducted for the first time on phenolics from T. pratense subsp. nivale, revealed the presence in this plant of several flavonoid derivatives the same as in T. pratense. The higher amount of prunetin in snow clover suggest a possible role of this isoflavone as a chemotaxonomic marker for this subspecies. Moreover, snow clover may represent an interesting new source of natural isoflavones with a different concentration pattern than in red clover.
Coalgebraic Behavioral Metrics

We study different behavioral metrics, such as those arising from both branching and linear-time semantics, in a coalgebraic setting. Given a coalgebra $\alpha\colon X \to HX$ for a functor $H \colon \mathrm{Set}\to \mathrm{Set}$, we define a framework for deriving pseudometrics on $X$ which measure the behavioral distance of states. A crucial step is the lifting of the functor $H$ on $\mathrm{Set}$ to a functor $\overline{H}$ on the category $\mathrm{PMet}$ of pseudometric spaces. We present two different approaches which can be viewed as generalizations of the Kantorovich and Wasserstein pseudometrics for probability measures. We show that the pseudometrics provided by the two approaches coincide on several natural examples, but in general they differ. If $H$ has a final coalgebra, every lifting $\overline{H}$ yields in a canonical way a behavioral distance which is usually branching-time, i.e., it generalizes bisimilarity. In order to model linear-time metrics (generalizing trace equivalences), we show sufficient conditions for lifting distributive laws and monads. These results enable us to employ the generalized powerset construction.
Fibrinogen Binding to Intercellular Adhesion Molecule 1: Implications for Plasmodium falciparum Adhesion

ABSTRACT Intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) is an endothelial cell adhesion molecule implicated in cerebral malaria. We investigated whether fibrinogen affects Plasmodium falciparum binding to ICAM-1, as the ICAM-1 binding sites of P. falciparum and fibrinogen overlap. We show that fibrinogen dramatically reduces P. falciparum adhesion to ICAM-1 under flow conditions.
Finding the state sequence maximizing P(O; I|λ) on distributed HMMs with Privacy

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely used by many applications for forecasting purposes. They are increasingly becoming popular models as part of prediction systems in finance, marketing, bio-informatics, speech recognition, signal processing, and so on. Given an HMM, an application of HMMs is to choose a state sequence so that the joint probability of an observation sequence and a state sequence given the model is maximized. Although this seems an easy task if the model is given, it becomes a challenge when the model is distributed between various parties. Due to privacy, financial, and legal reasons, the model owners might not want to integrate their split models. In this paper, we propose schemes to select a state sequence so that the joint probability of an observation sequence and a state sequence given the model is maximized when the model is horizontally or vertcally distributed between two parties while preserving their privacy. We then analyze the proposed schemes in terms of privacy, accuracy, and additional overhead costs. Since privacy, accuracy, and performance are conflicting goals, our proposed methods are able to achieve an equilibrium among them.
Folding and Function of the Troponin Tail Domain

Troponin contains a globular Ca2+-binding domain and an elongated tail domain composed of the N terminus of subunit troponin T (TnT). The tail domain anchors troponin to tropomyosin and actin, modulates myosin function, and is a site of cardiomyopathy-inducing mutations. Critical interactions between tropomyosin and troponin are proposed to depend on tail domain residues 112–136, which are highly conserved across phyla. Most cardiomyopathy mutations in TnT flank this region. Three such mutations were examined and had contrasting effects on peptide TnT-(1–156), promoting folding and thermal stability assessed by circular dichroism (F110I) or weakening folding and stability (T104V and to a small extent R92Q). Folding of both TnT-(1–156) and whole troponin was promoted by replacing bovine TnT Thr-104 with human TnT Ala-104, further indicating the importance of this cardiomyopathy site residue for protein folding. Mutation F110I markedly stabilized the troponin tail but weakened binding of holo-troponin to actin-tropomyosin 8-fold, suggesting that loss of flexibility impairs troponin tail function. The effect of the F110I mutation on troponin-tropomyosin binding to actin was much less, indicating this flexibility is particularly important for the interactions of troponin with tropomyosin. We suggest that most cardiomyopathic mutations in the troponin tail alter muscle function indirectly, by perturbing interactions between troponin and tropomyosin requisite for the complex effects of these proteins on myosin.
Eye-Gaze Pattern Analysis as a Key to Understanding Co-occurring Social Anxiety within Autism Spectrum Disorder

Emerging research suggests that many adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience impairing Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) or social anxiety symptoms (e.g., Joshi et al., 2013; Kleinhans et al., 2010), yet there is little guidance or agreement about how to best assess social anxiety in this population. Direct examination of overt eye gaze patterns may help determine if the attentional biases often reported in people with SAD also operate in those with ASD and cooccurring social anxiety. This study sought to assess the influence of social anxiety on gaze patterns in adults with ASD. An exploratory aim was to better understand the phenomenology of SAD within ASD. Three groups of participants were included: adults with ASD (n = 25), adults with SAD (n = 25), and adults without ASD or SAD (n = 25). As hypothesized, a large subset (n = 11; 44%) of the participants with ASD met diagnostic criteria for SAD. Contrary to study hypotheses related to gaze patterns, however, there was no evidence for gaze vigilance followed by avoidance for socially threatening stimuli in either the ASD or SAD groups, and there was no relationship between fear of negative evaluation and gaze duration toward socially threatening stimuli within the ASD group. Possible reasons for these null findings are considered. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
The development and validation of the Humor at Work (HAW) scale

Abstract Two studies report the development and validation of the Humor At Work (HAW) questionnaire, developed specifically for the measurement of humor within workplace settings. Using an empirical approach to item selection, 150 items were administered over the internet to an international (largely Australian) sample of 339 individuals in a range of occupations. Exploratory factor analysis produced an initial questionnaire comprising eight scales. Study 2 administered the questionnaire, and several other self-report instruments, to a second sample of 377 working Australians. The eight confirmed scales were validated. Also using confirmatory factor analysis, the initial questionnaire was reduced to a final 13-item instrument comprising two scales: Pleasant Climate and Unpleasant Climate. These scales were independent of age, gender, education, and position. They were also independent of the factors of the Big Five, mood measures of positive and negative affect, social desirability, and altruism. Since Unpleasant Climate was positively correlated with the Climate of Fear measure of Ashkanasy and Nicholson (2003), and Pleasant Climate with the Affiliative and Self-Enhancing humor styles from Martin et al.’s (2003) Humor Styles Questionnaire, the HAW provides a useful measure of humor within the workplace environment.
A comparison of streaming extensions to BitTorrent

Peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols have been widely accepted by users and operators alike as efficient mechanisms for non real-time content distribution. It is therefore reasonable to extend these protocols to also handle more demanding applications, such as multimedia streaming. Many researchers have proposed modifications to the well known BitTorrent protocol in order to adapt it to the needs of such applications. In this paper we present findings from our experiments with three proposals for the integration of multimedia streaming into BitTorrent: the fixed-size window approach, the high-priority set approach and the stretching window approach. We evaluate these proposals under identical circumstances using our detailed packet-level BitTorrent simulator, showing that while all approaches are reasonably capable of supporting multimedia streaming, their different design choices have a pronounced effect on their streaming performance.
Indexing without spam

The presence of spam in a document ranking is a major issue for Web search engines. Common approaches that cope with spam remove from the document rankings those pages that are likely to contain spam. These approaches are implemented as post-retrieval processes, that filter out spam pages only after documents have been retrieved with respect to a user’s query. In this paper we suggest to remove spam pages at indexing time, therefore obtaining a pruned index that is virtually “spam-free”. We investigate the benefits of this approach from three points of view: indexing time, index size, and retrieval performances. Not surprisingly, we found that the strategy decreases both the time required by the indexing process and the space required for storing the index. Surprisingly instead, we found that by considering a spam-pruned version of a collection’s index, no difference in retrieval performance is found when compared to that obtained by traditional post-retrieval spam filtering approaches.
Extensions of Smoothing via Taut Strings

Suppose that we observe independent, identically distributed random pairs (X1; Y1), (X2; Y2), . , (Xn; Yn). Our goal is to estimate regression functions such as the conditional mean or nquantile of Y given X, where 0 0 is some tuning parameter. This framework is extended further in order to include binary or Poisson regression, and to include local variation penalties. The latter are needed in order to construct estimators adapting to inhomogenous smoothness of f . For the general framework we develop noniterative algorithms for the solution of the minimization problems which are closely related to the taut string algorithm (cf. Davies and Kovac 2001).
An approach for supporting temporal partitioning and software reuse in integrated modular avionics

The integrated modular avionics (IMA) approach can achieve lower overall hardware costs and reduced level of spares by getting multiple applications that have traditionally been implemented using separate, federated units to share hardware resources. However, the IMA approach also brings new challenges that did not exist in the federated setup. Avoiding unwanted dependencies among applications and managing the reuse of legacy code tops the list of challenges. This paper describes a two-layer software architecture, which enables the integration of multiple applications while maintaining strong spatial and temporal partitioning among application modules. In addition, the architecture allows the reusability of existent software modules by enabling the integration of applications written for different real-time operating systems.
Relocation of nucleolar fibrillarin in Trypanosoma cruzi during stationary phase

ERNESTO GUERRERO-SÁNCHEZ, ANA MARÍA CEVALLOS, SANTIAGO MARTÍNEZ-CALVILLO, IMELDA LÓPEZ-VILLASEÑOR and ROBERTO HERNÁNDEZ* Departamento de Biología Molecular y Biotecnología, Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria, CP 04360, México Unidad de Biomedicina, Facultad de Estudios Superiores Iztacala, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Av. De los Barrios 1, CP 54090, México
In vivo and in vitro evidence that chronic activation of the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway interferes with leptin-dependent STAT 3 phosphorylation

Zimmerman AD, Harris RB. In vivo and in vitro evidence that chronic activation of the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway interferes with leptin-dependent STAT3 phosphorylation. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 308: R543–R555, 2015. First published January 7, 2015; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00347. 2014. —We previously reported that a 2-day peripheral infusion of glucosamine caused leptin resistance in rats, suggesting a role for the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway (HBP) in the development of leptin resistance. Here we tested leptin responsiveness in mice in which HBP activity was stimulated by offering 30% sucrose solution in addition to chow and water or by infusing glucosamine. Mice were leptin resistant after 33 days of access to sucrose. Resistance was associated with increased activity of the HBP and with phosphorylation of transcription factor signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 Tyr705 [pSTAT3(Y705)] but inhibition of suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 in the liver and hypothalamus. Intravenous infusion of glucosamine for 3 h stimulated pSTAT3(Y705) but prevented leptin-induced phosphorylation of STAT3(S727). In an in vitro system, glucose, glucosamine, and leptin each dose dependently increased O-linked -N-acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) protein and pSTAT3(Y705) in HepG2 cells. To test the effect of glucose on leptin responsiveness cells were incubated in 5.5 mM (LG) or 20 mM (HG) glucose for 18 h and were treated with 0 or 50 ng/ml leptin for 15 min. HG alone and LG leptin produced similar increases in O-GlcNAc protein, glutamine fructose-6-phosphate amidotransferase (GFAT), and pSTAT3(Y705) compared with LG media. Leptin did not stimulate these proteins in HG cells, suggesting leptin resistance. Leptin-induced pSTAT3(S727) was prevented by HG media. Inhibition of GFAT with azaserine prevented LG leptin and HG stimulation of pSTAT3. These data demonstrate development of leptin resistance in sucrose-drinking mice and provide new evidence of leptin-induced stimulation of the HBP.
The role of familiarity and creativity in the generation of affective responses to advertising : proposal and evaluation of a pairing-congruity method

English) Research on assessing advertising effectiveness has been conducted for more than a 100 years, in a host of disciplines including sociology, neuroscience, marketing, linguistics, philosophy, consumer psychology, and anthropology. Over this time, the field of study has gone through changes in approach based on developments in these fields and on their respective interests in measuring the impact of advertising. Interdisciplinary research has generated compound approaches such as neuro-marketing or neuro-economics, bringing new evidence to bear on our understanding of human reactions and behavior related to products and brands. The importance of advertising effectiveness is recognized both by practitioners who demand faster and more accurate methods to address real world marketing communications challenges, and by researchers seeking models to better understand the market and consumer behavior phenomena. However, lack of communication between these two spheres has made research application complicated and sometimes out of touch with real needs. Independent work by practitioners cannot keep-up with the new technologies and knowledge that quickly emerge in the scientific fields; while researchers in their laboratories are often at a critical remove in applying their methods to actual scenarios. It is crucial to approach advertising research in close contact with the industry, to merge the interests and outcomes from both sides, in order to define and achieve shared objectives with a broader perspective and greater consensus. As science evolves, novel theories about human capabilities are born and investigated. In terms of affect, research has accelerated in the past two decades, mainly due to the use of advanced technologies; however, there are still many
Evaluation of a segmentation algorithm designed for an FPGA implementation

The present work has to be seen in the context of real-time on-board image evaluation of optical satellite data. With on board image evaluation more useful data can be acquired, the time to get requested information can be decreased and new real-time applications are possible. Because of the relative high processing power in comparison to the low power consumption, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has been chosen as an adequate hardware platform for image processing tasks. One fundamental part for image evaluation is image segmentation. It is a basic tool to extract spatial image information which is very important for many applications such as object detection. Therefore a special segmentation algorithm using the advantages of FPGA technology has been developed. The aim of this work is the evaluation of this algorithm. Segmentation evaluation is a difficult task. The most common way for evaluating the performance of a segmentation method is still subjective evaluation, in which human experts determine the quality of a segmentation. This way is not in compliance with our needs. The evaluation process has to provide a reasonable quality assessment, should be objective, easy to interpret and simple to execute. To reach these requirements a so called Segmentation Accuracy Equality norm (SA EQ) was created, which compares the difference of two segmentation results. It can be shown that this norm is capable as a first quality measurement. Due to its objectivity and simplicity the algorithm has been tested on a specially chosen synthetic test model. In this work the most important results of the quality assessment will be presented.
Dapple: Improved Techniques for Finding Spots on DNA Microarrays

A key step in experiments using DNA microarrays is locating the thousands of individual spots in a scanned array image. Each spot provides quantitative information about a distinct DNA sequence, so it is imperative that spots be found and quantitated accurately. Spot finding is complicated by variations in the positions and sizes of spots and by the presence of artifacts and background noise in microarray images. We describe Dapple, a new spot finding implementation for microarrays on glass slides. Dapple finds spots using morphological information which is robust to both variation and artifacts. It achieves high spot finding throughput and accuracy by learning to evaluate the quality of candidate spots from examples supplied by the user. Dapple’s techniques are useful for improving the accuracy of data acquisition from
Late-Life Divorce and Postdivorce Adult Subjective Well-Being

Late-life divorce—divorce at 50 years and older—is an increasingly common event in the United States. Despite this trend, the conditions and outcomes for those involved in late-life divorce remain understudied. Drawing on Schlossberg’s transition theory, we assess four sets of risk and protective factors (i.e., situation, self, support, and coping strategies) that could influence the postdivorce life satisfaction of adults who experience late-life divorces. Using the data set of a nationally representative study, we obtained an analytical sample of 164 men and 145 women who reported a divorce at 50 years or older (N = 309). Results from ordinary least squares regression analysis indicate few statistically significant effects from the sets of risk and protective factors entered in the second and third steps of the analysis. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
Participatory design methods to define educational goals for full-body interaction

The paper presents an exploratory study aimed toward including children in the design of an Interactive Learning Environment based on Full-Body Interaction. The study proposes a method based on using Participatory Design techniques to analyze core meanings and misconceptions of children. The aim is to identify appropriate learning goals and to define concepts capable of bridging between children's knowledge and novel contents. Furthermore, it explores a novel approach aimed at fostering design methods suitable for a Full-Body Interaction experience. The results show the benefits of the method in defining guidelines for a first design proposal of a Learning Environment based on environmental education.