Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of the DNA Sensor STING in Protection from Lethal Infection following Corneal and Intracerebral Challenge with Herpes Simplex Virus 1

ABSTRACT STING is a protein in the cytosolic DNA and cyclic dinucleotide sensor pathway that is critical for the initiation of innate responses to infection by various pathogens. Consistent with this, herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) causes invariable and rapid lethality in STING-deficient (STING−/−) mice following intravenous (i.v.) infection. In this study, using real-time bioluminescence imaging and virological assays, as expected, we demonstrated that STING−/− mice support greater replication and spread in ocular tissues and the nervous system. In contrast, they did not succumb to challenge via the corneal route even with high titers of a virus that was routinely lethal to STING−/− mice by the i.v. route. Corneally infected STING−/− mice also showed increased periocular disease and increased corneal and trigeminal ganglia titers, although there was no difference in brain titers. They also showed elevated expression of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and CXCL9 relative to control mice but surprisingly modest changes in type I interferon expression. Finally, we also showed that HSV strains lacking the ability to counter autophagy and the PKR-driven antiviral state had near-wild-type virulence following intracerebral infection of STING−/− mice. Together, these data show that while STING is an important component of host resistance to HSV in the cornea, its previously shown immutable role in mediating host survival by the i.v. route was not recapitulated following a mucosal infection route. Furthermore, our data are consistent with the idea that HSV counters STING-mediated induction of the antiviral state and autophagy response, both of which are critical factors for survival following direct infection of the nervous system. IMPORTANCE HSV infections represent an incurable source of morbidity and mortality in humans and are especially severe in neonatal and immunocompromised populations. A key step in the development of an immune response is the recognition of microbial components within infected cells. The host protein STING is important in this regard for the recognition of HSV DNA and the subsequent triggering of innate responses. STING was previously shown to be essential for protection against lethal challenge from intravenous HSV-1 infection. In this study, we show that the requirement for STING depends on the infection route. In addition, STING is important for appropriate regulation of the inflammatory response in the cornea, and our data are consistent with the idea that HSV modulates STING activity through inhibition of autophagy. Our results elucidate the importance of STING in host protection from HSV-1 and demonstrate the redundancy of host protective mechanisms, especially following mucosal infection.
Cramer-Rao bound on projective image registration from feature points

We derive Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) on the estimation of projective image registration parameters from control points. We also bound the variance of the estimated position of a transformed pixel, and we extend this bound to an estimate of the second-order statistics of the pixel intensities. The variance of the pixel intensities varies spatially, and large variances occur at locations for which we have low confidence in the accuracy of the registered pixel intensities. Such information may be used in exploitation tasks to improve decision accuracy or for decision confidence reporting.
Mass Media Created Stereotypes: Influence on Student Learning

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the case of Saudi students at Riversdale State University (a pseudonym) with regard to the influence of the stereotype threat (McGlone & Aronson, 2007) created by TV and newspaper coverage when presenting images of Saudi Arabia, the Arab world, or the Muslim world. The study also aims at revealing the effects that the perception of the aforementioned stereotype can have on the academic success, social integration, and persistence of Saudi students. The research follows the qualitative approach to reveal the human aspects of the case and the degree of intensity that these stereotypes may create. Findings revealed essential information especially with the influx of Saudi students into the United States since 2006. They explained a part of the multifaceted situation specific to the case of Saudi students and showed the importance of awareness among students and college administrators of their situation. The findings also highlighted the importance of the active role of the Saudi students responding to these stereotypes. Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Exposed to new values, attitudes, and behavior patterns once in the United States, international students face a culture shock that is usually associated with stress, anxiety, feelings of powerlessness, perceptions of rejection, and consequences of isolation (Rahman & Rollock, 2004). Different cultural barriers constitute the most challenging obstacle towards a comprehensive learning experience for these students. Among these are negative stereotypes and inaccurate portrayals of one’s culture which are forms of neo-racism (Lee & Rice, 2007). The U.S. media coverage of world news always has an influence on the American nationals’ perceptions of the countries handled. Foreign students are likely to feel frustrated after exposure to U.S. media when handling international news that is related to their countries of origin (Viswanath, 1988). Moreover, mass media can influence impressions of other groups significantly creating and promoting stereotypes when direct information is limited (Fujioka, 1999). Since April 2006, thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States under a new rigorous Saudi government scholarship exchange program (Open Doors, 2008). Originating in a society that has relatively different norms and values from those of the United States, Saudi students experience difficulties in their adaptation, acculturation, and satisfaction with their college experience when studying at American colleges and universities (Thani, 1987). A part of these barriers is the stereotypes created by the mass media about Saudi Arabia, Islam, or Arabs. These stereotypes influence American students’ perceptions about Saudi students and consequently are reflected in the way they interact with them. They also influence Saudi students and direct their reactions to comments or questions during casual conversations or class discussions (Viswanath, 1988).
Theoretical Frameworks in Exercise Psychology

Reference to apparently unhealthy lifestyles in modern society is now common in popular and academic media. Contemporary diseases and conditions most often mentioned as having an association with physical inactivity include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. Indeed, obesity seems to be the health issue most worrying politicians and health professionals. and lack of physical activity is a key element of the energy imbalance that is causing current obesity trends (Bouchard, 2000; Bouchard & Blair. 1999). However. the beneficial effects of physical activity go far beyond healthy weight management. The five-phase behavioral epidemiology framework advocated by Sallis and Dwen (1999) is a useful way of viewing various processes in thc understanding of physical activity and health. The third phase is to identify factors that are associated with different levels of physical activity. Given the evidence supporting the beneficial effects of physical activity on health, it is important to identify factors that might be associated with the adoption and maintenance of the behavior. In this chapter, we focus on theoretical frameworks and perspectives that assist in the understanding of determinants and correlates of physical activity, thus addressing issues in phase 3 of the behavioral epidemiological framework.
A formal approach to frequent energy adaptations for multimedia applications

Much research has recently been done on adapting architectural resources of general-purpose processors to save energy at the cost of increased execution time. This work examines adaptation control algorithms for such processors running real-time multimedia applications. The best previous algorithms are mostly heuristics-based and ad hoc, requiring an impractically large amount of application-specific tuning and resource-specific tuning. We take a more formal approach that does not require the large tuning effort of previous approaches, and yet obtains average energy savings comparable to the best previous approach. We pose control algorithm design as a constrained optimization problem: what configuration should be used at each point in the program to minimize energy for a targeted performance given that each configuration has a different energy-performance tradeoff at each point? We solve this with the method of Lagrange multipliers, which assumes knowledge of the energy-performance tradeoffs. We develop a technique to estimate these tradeoffs using properties of multimedia applications. Our technique is likely extendible to other application domains. We compare our algorithm to the best previous algorithm for real-time multimedia applications, which is heuristics-based. We demonstrate the practical difficulty of the tuning process for the previous algorithm. Compared to a painstakingly hand-tuned version of that algorithm, our new algorithm provides similar energy savings through a more formal approach that does not need such heroic tuning, making it practical to implement.
Reciprocal Drag-and-Drop

Drag-and-drop has become ubiquitous, both on desktop computers and touch-sensitive surfaces. It is used to move and edit the geometry of elements in graphics editors, to adjust parameters using controllers such as sliders, or to manage views (e.g., moving and resizing windows, panning maps). Reverting changes made via a drag-and-drop usually entails performing the reciprocal drag-and-drop action. This can be costly as users have to remember the previous position of the object and put it back precisely. We introduce the DnD−1 model that handles all past locations of graphical objects. We redesign the Dwell-and-Spring widget to interact with this history, and explain how applications can implement DnD−1 to enable users to perform reciprocal drag-and-drop to any past location for both individual objects and groups of objects. We report on two user studies, whose results show that users understand DnD−1, and that Dwell-and-Spring enables them to interact with this model effectively.
Break it to Me Harshly: The Effects of Intersecting News Frames in Lung Cancer and Obesity Coverage

By examining the publicily identified top two health problems in the United States, this research, using an experimental design, investigates whether different news frame combinations intensify or diminish framing effects. In this study, the cognitive dimension and affective dimension of framing defined as thematic/episodic and gain/loss, respectively, are manipulated to determine if changing the way newspaper stories report obesity and lung cancer will alter the readers' attribution of societal and individual responsibility. This study revealed a significant interaction between thematic framing and loss framing on societal attribution of responsibility for the health issues—lung cancer and obesity.
Improving Bug Reporting, Duplicate Detection, and Localization

Software developers rely on essential textual information from bug reports (such as Observed Behavior, Expected Behavior, and Steps to Reproduce) to triage and fix software bugs. Unfortunately, while relevant and useful, this information is often missing, incomplete, superficial, ambiguous, or complex to follow. Low-quality content in bug reports causes delay and extra effort on bug triage and fixing. Current technology and research are insufficient to support users and developers on providing high-quality content in bug reports. Our research is intended to fill in this gap, as it aims at improving: (1) the quality of natural language content in bug reports, and (2) the accuracy of Text Retrieval (TR)-based bug localization and duplicate detection. To achieve such goals, our research will identify, enforce, and leverage the discourse that reporters use to describe software bugs.
Characterization of a Septobasidium sp. Associated with Felt Disease of Schisandra chinensis

Abstract Extensive disease surveys performed during the summers of 2013 and 2014 in Schisandra chinensis orchards resulted in the finding of a Septobasidium sp. associated with felt disease. The fungus was characterized to be symbiotic with a scale insect (Pseudaulacaspis cockerelli). Morphological and molecular characteristics of the Septobasidium isolates were investigated. The isolates were morphologically and phylogenetically close to S. bogoriense. We tentatively describe this isolate as a Septobasidium sp. , mainly because of the limited amount of information available on the internal transcribed spacer region of the ribosomal DNA of Septobasidium spp.
Generating physically realistic kinematic and dynamic models from small data sets: An application for sit-to-stand actions

Kinematic and dynamic models are used to create simplified, yet accurate representations of reality. In application to biological systems, there is often a choice on what level of complexity is appropriate for the model. This paper introduces a structured method for obtaining an accurate model that can represent the sit-to-stand motion and reproduce the associated contact forces in the standing phase. These models are generated from small datasets, just five measured sit-to-stand actions, and result in simple, physically realisable dynamic models. The assumptions made apriori on the model are minimal, with the number of segments, axes of rotation, marker allocation and location, and dynamic model all determined from this small dataset. From this initial analysis, the use of a triple pendulum with a simple point mass at the centre of the torso was found to be representative. Through the generation of these simple, repeatable models, this work aims to develop a modelling framework that is suitable for the study of biological systems and clinical use.
"Student perceptions of academic service and instructional quality over a four-year academic experience"

The text is published here with the permission of the Journal of Research in Education Pages in the published version are identified with the symbols, “[ ]. ” Additional information is at the end of this document. Keith Greiner is a Drake graduate and can be contacted at Keith.Greiner@iowa.gov. Tom Westbrook is a Professor of Education in the Leadership and Adult Development program at Drake University and can be contacted at thomas.westbrook@drake.edu
Parallel discrete event simulation: The making of a field

Originating in the 1970's, the parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) field grew from a group of researchers focused on determining how to execute a discrete event simulation program on a parallel computer while still obtaining the same results as a sequential execution. Over the decades that followed the field expanded, grew, and flourishes to this day. This paper describes the origins and development of the field in the words of many who were deeply involved. Unlike other published work focusing on technical issues, the emphasis here is on historical aspects that are not recorded elsewhere, providing a unique characterization of how the field was created and developed.
Exploiting naive vs expert discourse annotations: an experiment using lexical cohesion to predict Elaboration / Entity-Elaboration confusions

This paper brings a contribution to the field of discourse annotation of corpora. Using ANNODIS, a french corpus annotated with discourse relations by naive and expert annotators, we focus on two of them, Elaboration and Entity-Elaboration. These two very frequent relations are (a) often confused by naive annotators (b) difficult to detect automatically as their signalling is poorly studied. We propose to use lexical cohesion to differentiate between them, and show that Elaboration is more cohesive than Entity-Elaboration. We then integrate lexical cohesion cues in a classification experiment, obtaining highly satisfying results.
pSum-SaDE: A Modified p-Median Problem and Self-Adaptive Differential Evolution Algorithm for Text Summarization

Extractive multidocument summarization is modeled as a modified p-median problem. The problem is formulated with taking into account four basic requirements, namely, relevance, information coverage, diversity, and length limit that should satisfy summaries. To solve the optimization problem a self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm is created. Differential evolution has been proven to be an efficient and robust algorithm for many real optimization problems. However, it still may converge toward local optimum solutions, need to manually adjust the parameters, and finding the best values for the control parameters is a consuming task. In the paper is proposed a self-adaptive scaling factor in original DE to increase the exploration and exploitation ability. This paper has found that self-adaptive differential evolution can efficiently find the best solution in comparison with the canonical differential evolution. We implemented our model on multi-document summarization task. Experiments have shown that the proposed model is competitive on the DUC2006 dataset.
Effects of emotional content and emotional voice on speech intelligibility in younger and older adults

The effects of emotional content and emotional voice on speech intelligibility in younger and older adults was investigated. Twenty-eight younger adults with good health and clinically normal hearing thresholds in the speech range were tested. The stimuli used were the 200 sentences from the NU6 lists. The stimuli were presented to one group visually as text on paper, and to two groups auditorally, through two loudspeakers in a sound-attenuating booth. Means were obtained for both valence and arousal ratings for all three groups. The SNR threshold data were collected on young adults with normal hearing by Richard Wilson and colleagues using the female voice. Analyses revealed a significant positive correlation between valence and arousal for participants in the visual condition. The results indicated that the emotional arousal of listeners to a particular word can affect intelligibility, depending on the modality of presentation.
Anastrozole and everolimus in advanced gynecologic and breast malignancies: activity and molecular alterations in the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway

Background: Since PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway activation diminishes the effects of hormone therapy, combining aromatase inhibitors (anatrozole) with mTOR inhibitors (everolimus) was investigated. Patients and Methods: We evaluated anastrozole and everolimus in 55 patients with metastatic estrogen (ER) and/or progesterone receptor (PR)-positive breast and gynecologic tumors. Endpoints were safety, antitumor activity and molecular correlates. Results: Full doses of anastrozole (1 mg PO daily) and everolimus (10 mg PO daily) were well tolerated. Twelve of 50 evaluable patients (24%) (median = 3 prior therapies) achieved stable disease (SD) ≥ 6 months/partial response (PR)/complete response (CR) (n = 5 (10%) with PR/CR): 9 of 32 (28%) with breast cancer (n=5 (16%) with PR/CR); 2 of 10 (20%), ovarian cancer; and 1 of 6 (17%), endometrial cancer. Six of 22 patients (27%) with molecular alterations in the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway achieved SD ≥ 6 months/PR/CR. Six of 8 patients (75%) with SD ≥ 6 months/PR/CR with molecular testing demonstrated at least one alteration in the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway: mutations in PIK3CA (n=3) and AKT1 (n=1) or PTEN loss (n=3). All three responders (CR (n = 1); PR (n=2)) who had next generation sequencing demonstrated additional alterations: amplifications in CCNE1, IRS2, MCL1, CCND1, FGFR1 and MYC and a rearrangement in PRKDC. Conclusions: Combination anastrozole and everolimus is well tolerated at full approved doses, and is active in heavily-pretreated patients with ER and/or PR-positive breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers. Responses were observed in patients with multiple molecular aberrations. Clinical Trails Included: NCT01197170
Dietary Epidemiology of Essential Tremor: Meat Consumption and Meat Cooking Practices

Background/Aim: Harmane [1-methyl-9H-pyrido(3,4-b)indole] is a tremor-producing neurotoxin. Blood harmane concentrations are elevated in essential tremor (ET) patients for unclear reasons. Potential mechanisms include increased dietary harmane intake (especially through well-cooked meat) or genetic-metabolic factors. We tested the hypothesis that meat consumption and level of meat doneness are higher in ET cases than in controls. Methods: Detailed data were collected using the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Meat Questionnaire. Results: Total current meat consumption was greater in men with than without ET (135.3 ± 71.1 vs. 110.6 ± 80.4 g/day, p = 0.03) but not in women with versus without ET (80.6 ± 50.0 vs. 79.3 ± 51.0 g/day, p = 0.76). In an adjusted logistic regression analysis in males, higher total current meat consumption was associated with ET (OR = 1.006, p = 0.04, i.e., with 10 additional g/day of meat, odds of ET increased by 6%). Male cases had higher odds of being in the highest than lowest quartile of total current meat consumption (adjusted OR = 21.36, p = 0.001). Meat doneness level was similar in cases and controls. Conclusion: This study provides evidence of a dietary difference between male ET cases and male controls. The etiological ramifications of these results warrant additional investigation.
Optimizing Personalized Email Filtering Thresholds to Mitigate Sequential Spear Phishing Attacks

Highly targeted spear phishing attacks are increasingly common, and have been implicated in many major security breeches. Email filtering systems are the first line of defense against such attacks. These filters are typically configured with uniform thresholds for deciding whether or not to allow a message to be delivered to a user. However, users have very significant differences in both their susceptibility to phishing attacks as well as their access to critical information and credentials that can cause damage. Recent work has considered setting personalized thresholds for individual users based on a Stackelberg game model. We consider two important extensions of the previous model. First, in our model user values can be substitutable, modeling cases where multiple users provide access to the same information or credential. Second, we consider attackers who make sequential attack plans based on the outcome of previous attacks. Our analysis starts from scenarios where there is only one credential and then extends to more general scenarios with multiple credentials. For single-credential scenarios, we demonstrate that the optimal defense strategy can be found by solving a binary combinatorial optimization problem called PEDS. For multiple-credential scenarios, we formulate it as a bilevel optimization problem for finding the optimal defense strategy and then reduce it to a single level optimization problem called PEMS using complementary slackness conditions. Experimental results show that both PEDS and PEMS lead to significant higher defender utilities than two existing benchmarks in different parameter settings. Also, both PEDS and PEMS are more robust than the existing benchmarks considering uncertainties.