Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis type 2 as probable etiological agent of canine cutaneous leishmaniasis in Brazilian Amazon

Canine cutaneous leishmaniasis (CCL) is a zoonosis of public health interest, and in the Americas, Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis has been identified as the main etiological agent. The present study sought to investigate Leishmania spp. infection in domestic dogs from a rural area of the Xapuri municipality, Acre state, Brazilian Amazonia. For this purpose, visits were carried out to domiciles where the human cases of American cutaneous leishmaniasis (ACL) occurred, followed by the clinical evaluation of the animals in search of clinical signs suggestive of CCL. Blood samples were collected from 40 dogs, 13 of which had lesions suggestive of CCL, and biopsies of these lesions were performed. The methods used were Neal, Novy, and Nicolle’s (NNN) medium cultures and direct parasitological examination. Further, to detect and characterize Leishmania DNA some molecular techniques were performed such as conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequencing targeting SSU rDNA and ITS1, restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) and high resolution melting (HRM) analysis targeting hsp70. The investigation revealed that the results obtained from the parasitological methods were negative. In PCR by ITS1 and network topology sequences, six strains from dogs, isolated from the Peruvian Andes, appeared identical to Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis type 2 (99–100%). By other molecular methods these samples turned out to be positive to Leishmania (Viannia) sp. The diagnosis of Leishmania in domestic dogs from Acre state showed a high proportion of infected animals, and the occurrence of L. braziliensis type 2 in Brazil for the first time. This new report suggests that L. braziliensis type 2 is both trans- and cis-Andean. However, more studies are needed regarding the clinical and diagnostic aspects of this species of Leishmania.
Diagnosing insulin resistance in the general population.

OBJECTIVE Difficulties in measuring insulin sensitivity prevent the identification of insulin-resistant individuals in the general population. Therefore, we compared fasting insulin, homeostasis model assessment (HOMA), insulin-to-glucose ratio, Bennett index, and a score based on weighted combinations of fasting insulin, BMI, and fasting triglycerides with the euglycemic insulin clamp to determine the most appropriate method for assessing insulin resistance in the general population. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Family history of diabetes, BMI, blood pressure, waist and hip circumference, fasting lipids, glucose, insulin, liver enzymes, and insulin sensitivity index (ISI) using the euglycemic insulin clamp were obtained for 178 normoglycemic individuals aged 25-68 years. Product-moment correlations were used to examine the association between ISI and various surrogate measurements of insulin sensitivity. Regression models were used to devise weights for each variable and to identify cutoff points for individual components of the score. A bootstrap procedure was used to identify the most useful predictors of ISI. RESULTS Correlation coefficients between ISI and fasting insulin, HOMA, insulin-to-glucose ratio, and the Bennett index were similar in magnitude. The variables that best predicted insulin sensitivity were fasting insulin and fasting triglycerides. The use of a score based on Mffm/I = exp[2.63 - 0.28ln(insulin) - 0.31ln(TAG)] rather than the use of fasting insulin alone resulted in a higher sensitivity and a maintained specificity when predicting insulin sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS A weighted combination of two routine laboratory measurements, i.e., fasting insulin and triglycerides, provides a simple means of screening for insulin resistance in the general population.
Accelerated dendritic-cell migration and T-cell priming in SPARC-deficient mice

On their path to draining lymph nodes, epidermal Langerhans cells traverse collagen-dense connective tissue before reaching lymphatic vessels. The matricellular protein SPARC (secreted protein, acidic and rich in cysteine), which is induced during inflammation and tissue repair, organizes collagen deposition in tissue stroma. We analyzed Langerhans cell and dendritic-cell migration and its impact on T-cell priming in SPARC-null (SPARC–/–) and SPARC-sufficient (SPARC+/+) mice. Although the same number of Langerhans cells populate the ear skin of SPARC–/– and SPARC+/+ mice, more Langerhans cells were found in the lymph nodes draining antigen-sensitized ears of SPARC–/– mice and significantly more Langerhans cells migrated from null-mice-derived ear skin explants. Such favored Langerhans cell migration is due to the host environment, as demonstrated by SPARC+/+>SPARC–/– and reciprocal chimeras, and have a profound influence on T-cell priming. Contact-, delayed type-hypersensitivity and naive T-cell receptor-transgenic T-cell priming, together indicate that the lack of SPARC in the environment accelerates the onset of T-cell priming by hastening Langerhans cell/dendritic-cell migration.
Deep-Learned Collision Avoidance Policy for Distributed Multiagent Navigation

High-speed, low-latency obstacle avoidance that is insensitive to sensor noise is essential for enabling multiple decentralized robots to function reliably in cluttered and dynamic environments. While other distributed multiagent collision avoidance systems exist, these systems require online geometric optimization where tedious parameter tuning and perfect sensing are necessary. We present a novel end-to-end framework to generate reactive collision avoidance policy for efficient distributed multiagent navigation. Our method formulates an agent's navigation strategy as a deep neural network mapping from the observed noisy sensor measurements to the agent's steering commands in terms of movement velocity. We train the network on a large number of frames of collision avoidance data collected by repeatedly running a multiagent simulator with different parameter settings. We validate the learned deep neural network policy in a set of simulated and real scenarios with noisy measurements and demonstrate that our method is able to generate a robust navigation strategy that is insensitive to imperfect sensing and works reliably in all situations. We also show that our method can be well generalized to scenarios that do not appear in our training data, including scenes with static obstacles and agents with different sizes. Videos are available at https://sites.google. com/view/deepmaca.
The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia, CORE, is an association of

adjunct member of the department of computer science and software engineering at the University of Melbourne. Her background is in cryptography and her research area is secure electronic voting systems. Roland Wen has recently submitted his PhD thesis at UNSW on secure online elections in Australia. We would be very happy to discuss any of these issues further. Summary This submission is an attempt to give an overview of the options for using computers to assist in the voting process. For each solution, we discuss the extent to which the solutions could achieve reasonable privacy, transparency and security. We also comment upon some recent electronic voting trials in NSW and Victoria, using only information that is publicly available.
A constrained road-based VR navigation technique for travelling in 3D city models

In this paper we propose a novel navigation metaphor for the exploration of 3D city models in virtual environments. The presented metaphor supports intuitive navigation without disorientation through 3D city models in a manner similar to travelling in the real world. Based on a graph representation of the road network of a 3D city model camera paths are calculated and used to enable smooth camera motion. We will explain how smooth camera motions are computed and describe a user interface usable in both desktop-based as well as projection-based environments to specify travel destinations.
Side Effect Prediction Using Cooperative Pathways

Drugs and biological experiments are designed to affect a particular target gene or pathway. However, they might inadvertently activate other pathways and cause side effects.Because of the existence of complex cellular mechanisms responding to stimuli,it is difficult to detect the presence of such side effects.Therefore, identification of pathways that function together under identical conditions would greatly help in anticipating these side effects before conducting these experiments. We develop a novel method to enumerate ``cooperative pathways'' defined as pathways that functiontogether under identical conditionsby combining pathway networks withcomprehensive gene expression profiles.For finding cooperative pathways from whole pathways,we propose an efficient algorithm, CoopeRativE Pathway Enumerator (CREPE),which enumerates connected subpathways having common activate conditionsand selects combinations of the subpathways sharing the conditions. %We apply CREPE to a yeast stress dataset combined with the KEGG pathways.We observe that the starch and sucrose metabolism pathwaycooperates with the pyruvate metabolism under heat shock stresses. It cooperates with the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle under the stationary phases.
Fast detection and segmentation in retinal blood vessels using Gabor filters

The relationship between change in retinal vessels morphology and progress to detect the signs of diabetic retinopathy in the early stages has been the major subject of ophthalmologists. However, the accurate segmentation and fast detection of vessels to diagnosis disease have been given important role in quality of application. In this paper, in order to capture high frequency information a bank of 180 Gabor filters is used. Additionally, a systematic way of determining the threshold value for reliable performance is described. The proposed approach is applied to images from DRIVE retina database. The results of efficient segmentation indicate that time of detection is considerable. The accuracy of the segmentation is better and the time required to perform the segmentation is faster than many other methods in the literature.
2 Solid and Liquid States of Lactose

Lactose in dairy systems can exist in various crystalline and non-crystalline forms. These forms affect lactose behaviour, particularly in processing and storage of low-water dairy foods. Crystalline -lactose monohydrate and anhydrous -lactose are well-known solid forms of lactose, which are relatively poorly soluble in water. Its occurrence in two anomeric forms, and -lactose, makes its solubility a complex function of temperature. -Lactose has low solubility in water at room temperature, but mutarotation to equilibrium quantities of the and -forms increases the overall solubility of lactose which increases rapidly with increasing temperature, with a more rapid increase in the solubility of -lactose. Liquid dairy systems contain dissolved lactose in a complex chemical environment and lactose is likely to exist in a composition-, temperatureand process-dependent / -ratio. On rapid removal of solvent water from dairy liquids on dehydration or freezing, lactose molecules retain their solution structure and, therefore, amorphous, non-crystalline solid forms of lactose are typical of dairy powders and frozen dairy desserts (Roos, 1995; Hartel, 2001). Amorphous lactose in dairy solids may often exist in a glassy, solid state or in a syrup-like, super-cooled liquid state. The apparent glass-like solid state results from a very high viscosity exceeding 10 Pa s (White and Cakebread, 1966). The state transition of amorphous solidand liquid-like states occurs over a second-order-type state transition known as the glass transition (White and Cakebread, 1966), as described in Figure 2.1. The glass transition involves no latent heat but it can be observed from changes in heat capacity, thermal expansion coefficient, dielectric properties, various mechanical and flow properties and molecular mobility (White
Summarizing Definition from Wikipedia

Wikipedia provides a wealth of knowledge, where the first sentence, infobox (and relevant sentences), and even the entire document of a wiki article could be considered as diverse versions of summaries (definitions) of the target topic. We explore how to generate a series of summaries with various lengths based on them. To obtain more reliable associations between sentences, we introduce wiki concepts according to the internal links in Wikipedia. In addition, we develop an extended document concept lattice model to combine wiki concepts and non-textual features such as the outline and infobox. The model can concatenate representative sentences from non-overlapping salient local topics for summary generation. We test our model based on our annotated wiki articles which topics come from TREC-QA 2004--2006 evaluations. The results show that the model is effective in summarization and definition QA.
Mindfulness-Based Attention as a Moderator of the Relationship Between ADHD and Comordid Disorders

ADHD continues to be a problem affecting not only those with the disorder themselves but also the people they interact with and are close to, as well as society as a whole. Although some treatment options exist, a large percentage of individuals with ADHD remain untreated and many of those who do obtain treatment continue to struggle with the disorder. Those with ADHD and one or more co-occurring psychological disorders are particularly in need of alternative treatment options. To inform the development of alternative treatment options particularly for this population, further research on the relationship between ADHD and frequently co-occurring psychological disorders is critical. A number of studies have suggested that ADHD is predictive of depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. Studies examining these relationships have not largely focused on the possible presence of a moderating variable. Mindfulness may be conceptually related to these risk factors, as many of the impairments involved in ADHD are shown to improve in association with mindfulness practice, and mindfulness-based interventions have been found to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. Few studies however have examined how mindfulness might be related to ADHD. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between ADHD and the following factors: (1) depression, (2) anxiety, (3) alcohol abuse, and (4) mindfulness. As expected, a significant positive relationship was found between ADHD and depression. Also, as expected, significant negative relationships were found between mindfulness and ADHD, mindfulness and depression, and mindfulness and anxiety. Contrary to expectations, a significant relationship was not found between ADHD and anxiety or between ADHD and alcohol consumption. Further, contrary to expectations, level of mindfulness did not significantly moderate the relationship between ADHD and depression, ADHD and anxiety, or ADHD and alcohol consumption. Thus, the present study’s findings did not support the hypothesis that having a disposition towards mindfulness serves as protective factor when it comes to the relationship between ADHD and depression, anxiety, and alcohol consumption. The implications and limitations of these findings, as well as recommendations for future research are discussed.
Self-adaptive Schedule Mechanism for Peer-to-peer Multi-rate Live Streaming System

Traditional peer-to-peer live streaming systems usually have one specific streaming rate for one single channel. However, with the terminals diversifying, especially smart mobile phones bursting, the desire for multi-rates from one single channel topology of P2P live streaming becomes urgent, while considering that the network environments and topologies always change momentarily. High rate stream would make some terminals lost media data due to limited bandwidth and CPU etc., while low rate one would bring low quality data for terminals even if they have enough resources. To solve above problems, a new method called self-adaptive scheduling mechanism is proposed. A stream is divided into several sub-streams with different bit rates. These sub-streams are delivered by only one channel topology. Terminals with different capacities and bandwidths play different roles and try their best to deliver sub-streams while cooperating with other peers in the channel. Users can change the bit rates of channels they are watching. Moreover the bit rates also can change according to the bandwidths of the network adaptively. This mechanism is implemented for live streaming in real system, called MoSee. The experimental results prove that the efficiency of the mechanism is good.
A Rapid and Low-Cost PCR Thermal Cycler for Low Resource Settings

Background Many modern molecular diagnostic assays targeting nucleic acids are typically confined to developed countries or to the national reference laboratories of developing-world countries. The ability to make technologies for the rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases broadly available in a portable, low-cost format would mark a revolutionary step forward in global health. Many molecular assays are also developed based on polymerase chain reactions (PCR), which require thermal cyclers that are relatively heavy (>20 pounds) and need continuous electrical power. The temperature ramping speed of most economical thermal cyclers are relatively slow (2 to 3°C/s) so a polymerase chain reaction can take 1 to 2 hours. Most of all, these thermal cyclers are still too expensive ($2k to $4k) for low-resource setting uses. Methodology/Principal Findings In this article, we demonstrate the development of a low-cost and rapid water bath based thermal cycler that does not require active temperature control or continuous power supply during PCR. This unit costs $130 to build using commercial off-the-shelf items. The use of two or three vacuum-insulated stainless-steel Thermos food jars containing heated water (for denaturation and annealing/extension steps) and a layer of oil on top of the water allow for significantly stabilized temperatures for PCR to take place. Using an Arduino-based microcontroller, we automate the “archaic” method of hand-transferring PCR tubes between water baths. Conclusions/Significance We demonstrate that this innovative unit can deliver high speed PCR (17 s per PCR cycle) with the potential to go beyond the 1,522 bp long amplicons tested in this study and can amplify from templates down to at least 20 copies per reaction. The unit also accepts regular PCR tubes and glass capillary tubes. The PCR efficiency of our thermal cycler is not different from other commercial thermal cyclers. When combined with a rapid nucleic acid detection approach, the thermos thermal cycler (TTC) can enable on-site molecular diagnostics in low-resource settings.
Decision-Making and Biases in Cybersecurity Capability Development: Evidence from a Simulation Game Experiment

We developed a simulation game to study the effectiveness of decision-makers in overcoming two complexities in building cybersecurity capabilities: potential delays in capability development; and uncertainties in predicting cyber incidents. Analyzing 1,479 simulation runs, we compared the performances of a group of experienced professionals with those of an inexperienced control group. Experienced subjects did not understand the mechanisms of delays any better than inexperienced subjects; however, experienced subjects were better able to learn the need for proactive decision-making through an iterative process. Both groups exhibited similar errors when dealing with the uncertainty of cyber incidents. Our findings highlight the importance of training for decision-makers with a focus on systems thinking skills, and lay the groundwork for future research on uncovering mental biases about the complexities of cybersecurity.
Carrier-based PWM-VSI overmodulation strategies: analysis, comparison, and design

In this paper, the overmodulation region voltage-gain characteristics and waveform quality of carrier-based pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) methods are investigated. Through detailed analytical study, voltage-gain characteristics are extracted independent of carrier frequency. The influence of blanking time and minimum pulsewidth (MPW) control on the inverter gain characteristics are studied and shown to be significant. A comparative evaluation of the modulator characteristics reveals the advantageous high-modulation-range characteristics of discontinuous PWM methods and, in particular, the superior overmodulation performance of a discontinuous PWM method. The modulation methods under consideration are tested on a PWM voltage-source inverter (VSI)-fed induction motor drive in the laboratory, and the theoretical results are verified by experiments. Also, a gain linearization technique is presented and experimentally verified. The results of this study are useful in the design, performance prediction and development of high-performance overmodulation strategies for PWM-VSI drives.
Decreases in maximal oxygen uptake following long-duration spaceflight: Role of convective and diffusive O2 transport mechanisms.

We have previously predicted that the decrease in maximal oxygen uptake (V̇o2max) that accompanies time in microgravity reflects decrements in both convective and diffusive O2 transport to the mitochondria of the contracting myocytes. The aim of this investigation was therefore to quantify the relative changes in convective O2 transport (Q̇o2) and O2 diffusing capacity (Do2) following long-duration spaceflight. In nine astronauts, resting hemoglobin concentration ([Hb]), V̇o2max, maximal cardiac output (Q̇Tmax), and differences in arterial and venous O2 contents ([Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text]) were obtained retrospectively for International Space Station Increments 19-33 (April 2009-November 2012). Q̇o2 and Do2 were calculated from these variables via integration of Fick's Principle of Mass Conservation and Fick's Law of Diffusion. V̇o2max significantly decreased from pre- to postflight (-53.9 ± 45.5%, P = 0.008). The significant decrease in Q̇Tmax (-7.8 ± 9.1%, P = 0.05), despite an unchanged [Hb], resulted in a significantly decreased Q̇o2 (-11.4 ± 10.5%, P = 0.02). Do2 significantly decreased from pre- to postflight by -27.5 ± 24.5% (P = 0.04), as did the peak [Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text] (-9.2 ± 7.5%, P = 0.007). With the use of linear regression analysis, changes in V̇o2max were significantly correlated with changes in Do2 (R2 = 0.47; P = 0.04). These data suggest that spaceflight decreases both convective and diffusive O2 transport. These results have practical implications for future long-duration space missions and highlight the need to resolve the specific mechanisms underlying these spaceflight-induced changes along the O2 transport pathway.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Long-duration spaceflight elicited a significant decrease in maximal oxygen uptake. Given the adverse physiological adaptations to microgravity along the O2 transport pathway that have been reported, an integrative approach to the determinants of postflight maximal oxygen uptake is needed. We demonstrate that both convective and diffusive oxygen transport are decreased following ~6 mo International Space Station missions.