Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic basis for resistance to polytropic murine leukemia viruses in the wild mouse species Mus castaneus

Cultured cells derived from the wild mouse species Mus castaneus were found to be uniquely resistant to exogenous infection by polytropic mink cell focus-forming (MCF) murine leukemia viruses (MuLVs). This MCF MuLV resistance is inherited as a genetically recessive trait in the progeny of F1 crosses between M. castaneus and MCF MuLV-susceptible laboratory mice. Examination of the progeny of backcrosses demonstrated that susceptibility is inherited as a single gene which maps to chromosome 1. The map location of this gene places it at or near the locus Rmc1, the gene encoding the receptor for MCF/xenotropic MuLVs, suggesting that resistance is mediated by the M. castaneus allele of this receptor.
Toward opportunistic services for the industrial Internet of Things

Services are expected to represent the real drivers for all Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios, including Industrial IoT (IIoT). Indeed, rather than focusing only on products, enterprises are now investing on product-service hybrids to improve operational efficiency, boost productivity and, most importantly, build new markets, hence diversifying their revenues. In this direction, IoT service modeling is a crucial activity requiring a multi-facet in-depth examination. In this paper, we first discuss the importance of IoT services by eliciting related benefits and challenges. Then, we tackle service modeling from both a developer-oriented (comprising highlevel descriptive metamodels and ontologies) and an enterprise-oriented (comprising operational models subject to formal verification and execution, such as extensions of the conventional Business Process Models, Petri Nets and WorkFlows) perspective, providing a conceptual mapping between these two complementary approaches. The proposed new paradigm of “Opportunistic IoT Service” extends the available models by explicitly considering essential features for service provision, i.e., dynamicity, context-awareness, co-location and transience.
Infanticide, Abortion, Children, and Childhood in Sweden, 1000–1980

The life course of women and men in most soc1et1es simply does not allow for childbirth and rearing during the entire period women are able to reproduce. Choices ha ve always been made not to ha ve children. Child bearing and the choices it involves have also been a source of social, cultural, and political conflict as the historiography of women, family, and fertility makes very clear. Yet it is also evident that revealing a society's attitudes towards infanticide and abortion, the subjects dealt with here, exposes the parameters of what is sanctioned or accepted as ways to limit reproduction in any particular society at any particular moment in time. Determining these restrictions has been central to policies on the regulation of populations practiced by the church, the state, government agencies, and civil society organizations such as medical societies and philanthropic organizations. Boundaries were also set by the norms developed in families and kinship networks. The negotiations related to these ! imitations reflect not only the position of women and concepts of family, but they are also integrated into the understanding of children and childhood during different periods of time.Critical issues such as these have been addressed through legal changes, the development and use of church registers, the establishment of midwives, the refinement of statistical surveys, the spread of education, and the conscious development of family and population policy. In a wider context, the understanding of populationchange and analyses of sexual behavior also had a bearing on and interacted with the techniques and technology of governance as early as the introduction of Chnstianity, during the debates on the high rates of infanticide of the seventeenth century, during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions about the predicament of unwed mothers, and in the discussions on the rise of the welfare system <luring the early to mid-twentieth century. The alternatives that emerged over the course of the centuries - criminalization, moral sanctions, more lenient legislation, the use of welfare schemes, and information campaigns - all had relevance, but the development of new surveillance techniques and knowledge systems also formed and transformed the understandings of the identity of the fetus and the newly born. The conflicts during the introduction of the Christian church form the backdrop for this article, begmnmg with the early modern era. It continues through the pivotal legislative action of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and then discusses the political and sc1enufic premises on which the Swedish welfare system was created in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Module generation of complex macros for logic-emulation applications

Logic emulation is a technique that uses dynamically reprogrammable systems for prototyping and design verification. Using an emulator, designers can realize designs through a software configuration process and perform real-time design verification before fabricating the chip into silicon. However, converting designs into an emulator involves the use of multi-phase design tasks, which is a very time-consuming process. Hence, shortening the Time-To-Emulation (TTE) is always the main concern for the logic-emulation design process. One approach t o shorten the design processing time is to replace portions of the design with macro cells. This paper presents a module generator for logic-emulation applications, which is able to generate macro cells of arbitrarily complex functions described in High-level Descriptive Languages the (HDLs), Furthermore, the module generator can effectively generate a multiple-FPGA macro for large macros which can not fit in a single FPGA chip. Experiments using the module generator for logic emulation are reported. The results demonstrate that the module generator can effectively and efficiently generate complex macros from their Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) description. In addition, the results also show that the design processing time is significantly shortened when the module generation method is incorporated into the logic-emulation design flow.
Sleep education improves the sleep duration of adolescents: a randomized controlled pilot study.

PURPOSE To determine the feasibility and pilot a sleep education program in New Zealand high school students. METHODS A parallel, two-arm randomized controlled pilot trial was conducted. High school students (13 to 16 years) were randomly allocated to either a classroom-based sleep education program intervention (n = 15) or to a usual curriculum control group (n = 14). The sleep education program involved four 50-minute classroom-based education sessions with interactive groups. Students completed a 7-day sleep diary, a sleep questionnaire (including sleep hygiene, knowledge and problems) at baseline, post-intervention (4 weeks) and 10 weeks follow-up. RESULTS An overall treatment effect was observed for weekend sleep duration (F 1,24 = 5.21, p = 0.03). Participants in the intervention group slept longer during weekend nights at 5 weeks (1:37 h:min, p = 0.01) and 10 weeks: (1:32 h:min, p = 0.03) compared to those in the control group. No differences were found between groups for sleep duration on weekday nights. No significant differences were observed between groups for any of the secondary outcomes (sleep hygiene, sleep problems, or sleep knowledge). CONCLUSIONS A sleep education program appears to increase weekend sleep duration in the short term. Although this program was feasible, most schools are under time and resource pressure, thus alternative methods of delivery should be assessed for feasibility and efficacy. Larger trials of longer duration are needed to confirm these findings and determine the sustained effect of sleep education on sleep behavior and its impact on health and psychosocial outcomes. COMMENTARY A commentary on this article appears in this issue on page 793.
Level of Human Immunodeficiency Virus DNA in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Correlates with Efficacy of Antiretroviral Therapy

ABSTRACT A novel colorimetric assay was developed and validated for accurate quantitation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) DNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). We tested 318 sequential samples from 56 subjects, 53 of whom were undergoing dual or triple therapy. Patients were considered responders when viremia levels were below 5,000 HIV RNA copies/ml. The mean DNA copy numbers for untreated and responder subjects were similar (72 and 75, respectively), while it was 4.54-fold higher for nonresponders (339). This report provides strong evidence that HIV DNA levels in PBMCs correlate with therapeutic efficacy and suggests that DNA quantitation is a useful tool to monitor the decay of the HIV reservoir toward disease remission, especially when viremia is undetectable.
Super-Compact Planar Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Bandpass Filter Composed of Capacitor-Loaded E-shaped Electrodes

This paper newly proposes a super-compact planar ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter composed of capacitor-loaded E-shaped electrodes. This capacitor supplies additional capacitance to the tightly-coupled electrodes, leading to relax the fabrication difficulties. By introducing the capacitor to the gap, response of the UWB passband is drastically improved. In the experiment, with a 0.5 pF capacitor, a clear UWB passband from 3.1 GHz to 11.4 GHz (FBW 114%) was obtained with small ripples of less than 0.5 dB and minimum insertion loss of 0.4 dB, which results show good agreement with the theory. Using this method, planar UWB filters can be made much more compact.
A New Branch-Line Hybrid Coupler with Arbitrary Power Division Ratio

This paper proposes a new branch-line hybrid coupler with controllable power ratio at the output ports. It is structured as two 90deg branch-line hybrid couplers connected by a variable impedance transmission line. The power division ratio is adjusted by controlling the impedance of the transmission line. Modeling the transmission line as series and parallel resonators shows that its impedance can be changed by changing the inductance and capacitance. In practice, using a varactor diode facilitates ease in dealing with the impedance of the transmission line and thus the power division ratio of the coupler.
Supporting change in product lines within the context of use case-driven development and testing

Product Line Engineering (PLE) is becoming a common practice in industry to enhance product quality, to reduce development costs, and to improve time-to-market. At the same time, many development contexts are use case-driven and this strongly influences their requirements engineering and system testing practices. In this PhD project, we aim to achieve automated and effective change management in a product family within the context of use case-driven development and system testing. To this end, we first provide a modeling method for capturing variability information explicitly in Product Line (PL) use case and domain models. Then, we propose an automated configuration approach to automatically generate Product Specific (PS) use case and domain models from PL models. In addition, we plan to provide a change impact analysis approach for PL use case and domain models and automated regression test selection for system test cases derived from PL use case models.
Lexicon-enhanced sentiment analysis framework using rule-based classification scheme

With the rapid increase in social networks and blogs, the social media services are increasingly being used by online communities to share their views and experiences about a particular product, policy and event. Due to economic importance of these reviews, there is growing trend of writing user reviews to promote a product. Nowadays, users prefer online blogs and review sites to purchase products. Therefore, user reviews are considered as an important source of information in Sentiment Analysis (SA) applications for decision making. In this work, we exploit the wealth of user reviews, available through the online forums, to analyze the semantic orientation of words by categorizing them into +ive and -ive classes to identify and classify emoticons, modifiers, general-purpose and domain-specific words expressed in the public’s feedback about the products. However, the un-supervised learning approach employed in previous studies is becoming less efficient due to data sparseness, low accuracy due to non-consideration of emoticons, modifiers, and presence of domain specific words, as they may result in inaccurate classification of users’ reviews. Lexicon-enhanced sentiment analysis based on Rule-based classification scheme is an alternative approach for improving sentiment classification of users’ reviews in online communities. In addition to the sentiment terms used in general purpose sentiment analysis, we integrate emoticons, modifiers and domain specific terms to analyze the reviews posted in online communities. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, we considered users reviews in three domains. The results obtained from different experiments demonstrate that the proposed method overcomes limitations of previous methods and the performance of the sentiment analysis is improved after considering emoticons, modifiers, negations, and domain specific terms when compared to baseline methods.
WORKING MEMORY: DEVELOPMENT, DISORDERS AND TRAINING

All previously published papers were reproduced with permission from the publisher. ABSTRACT Working memory: Development, Disorders and Training Working memory (WM) is the ability to keep information online during a short period of time. Brain regions underlying WM functioning are found in the frontal and parietal cortices. It is largely unknown to what extent the neural substrates underlying WM are susceptible to training induced change. Here we investigate the development of WM capacity, if improvement by training is possible and explore the neuronal correlates for training induced change. In Study I we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of the developmental change in WM capacity during childhood. We found that during performance of a visuo-spatial working memory test (VSWM), there was a significantly higher activity in the superior frontal and intraparietal cortex in subjects with higher capacity. Thus, the development of these areas may underlie the development of VSWM during childhood. In Study II we used the VSWM test in children with and without ADHD and found that the test differentiated between these groups (P<.01). This supports the hypothesis that the WM deficit is a core deficit in ADHD. We proceeded by investigating if it was possible to improve WM capacity by training on WM tasks and secondly, if training effects could generalize to other cognitive tasks and areas of behaviour. These hypotheses were tested by designing a computerized program for WM training which was implemented in children with ADHD in two consecutive studies. In Study III (N=14), we saw significant improvements in the treatment group as compared to the control group on the trained WM task (P < .001), on the non-trained WM tests (span-board P < .001, and digit span P < .001), as well as on other non-trained tasks; Stroop (P < .01) and Raven's matrices (P < .001). In Study IV the effects on the cognitive tests were replicated at a significance level of . 01, with a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multi-center design (N=44). In this study we also found generalisation of training effects to the behavioural level as evaluated by parents and teachers (inattention P < .01) and parent-rated hyperactivity/impulsivity P < . 05). In Study V we investigated if stroke patients with significant WM deficits also could benefit from training. Participants suffering stroke one to three years earlier gained significant improvements in WM capacity (digit span p < . 005, span board …
Application of real-time AMDF pitch-detection in a voice gender normalisation system

Traditionally the interest in voice gender conversion was of a more theoretical nature rather than founded in real-life applications. However, with the increase in mobile communication and the resulting limitation in transmission bandwidth new approaches to minimising data rates have to be developed. Here voice gender normalisation (VGN) presents an efficient method of achieving higher compression rates by using the VGN algorithm to remove gender specific components of a speech signal and thus enhancing the information content to be transmitted. A second application for VGN is in the field of speech controlled systems, where current speech recognition algorithms have to deal with the voice characteristics of a speaker as well as the information content. Here again the use of VGN can remove the speaker's voice gender characteristics and thus enhance the message contents. Therefore, such a system would be capable of achieving higher recognition rates while being independent of the speaker. This paper presents the theory of a VGN system and furthermore, outlines an efficient real-time hardware implementation for the use in portable communications equipment.
Menadione-Induced Oxidative Stress Re-Shapes the Oxylipin Profile of Aspergillus flavus and Its Lifestyle

Aspergillus flavus is an efficient producer of mycotoxins, particularly aflatoxin B1, probably the most hepatocarcinogenic naturally-occurring compound. Although the inducing agents of toxin synthesis are not unanimously identified, there is evidence that oxidative stress is one of the main actors in play. In our study, we use menadione, a quinone extensively implemented in studies on ROS response in animal cells, for causing stress to A. flavus. For uncovering the molecular determinants that drive A. flavus in challenging oxidative stress conditions, we have evaluated a wide spectrum of several different parameters, ranging from metabolic (ROS and oxylipin profile) to transcriptional analysis (RNA-seq). There emerges a scenario in which A. flavus activates several metabolic processes under oxidative stress conditions for limiting the ROS-associated detrimental effects, as well as for triggering adaptive and escape strategies.
Hardware/software prototyping of dependable real-time system for elderly health monitoring

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power microelectronics, and wireless networking enabled the proliferation of wireless sensor networks for wide applications. One of the promising applications of this domain is the distributed remote health monitoring of elderly people. An effective approach to speed up this and other bio-medical applications is to integrate a very high number of processing elements in a single chip so that the massive scale of fine-grain parallelism inherent in several bio-medical applications can be exploited efficiently. In this work, we present architecture and preliminary prototyping results of a novel dependable real-time system (BANSMOM1) targeted for elderly health monitoring. The proposed system achieves its real-time performance via parallel processing technique and a so called period-peak detection algorithm (PPD) for processing multi-lead Electrocardiography records.
High fidelity radiation pattern measurement system for small antennas

The paper describes a high fidelity system for measuring a radiation pattern of an electrically small antenna. In this system, the antenna under test (AUT) equipped with a battery powered signal generator is suspended by a dielectric foam in the centre of a pair of dielectric rings that are supported by a pedestal of a spherical positioning mechanical sub-system. Radiation patterns are obtained directly in spherical format using a suitably constructed probe antenna of linear or circular polarization. Measurements are controlled by a computer, which also stores and processes the measured data. The results reveal considerable differences between the radiation patterns of a small antenna obtained using the proposed wireless approach and the conventional one, in which the antenna is connected with a cable to the receiver.
Requalification of a Brazilian Trichoderma Collection and Screening of Its Capability to Decolourise Real Textile Effluent

Water contamination with large amounts of industrial textile coloured effluents is an environmental concern. For the treatment of textile effluents, white-rot fungi have received extensive attention due to their powerful capability to produce oxidative (e.g., ligninolytic) enzymes. In addition, other groups of fungi, such as species of Aspergillus and Trichoderma, have also been used for textile effluents treatment. The main aim of the present study was to requalify a Brazilian Trichoderma culture collection of 51 Trichoderma strains, isolated from different sources in Brazil and preserved in the oldest Latin-American Fungal Service Culture Collection, The Micoteca URM WDCM 804 (Recife, Brazil). Fungal isolates were re-identified through a polyphasic approach including macro- and micro-morphology and molecular biology, and screened for their capability to decolourise real effluents collected directly from storage tanks of a textile manufacture. Trichoderma atroviride URM 4950 presented the best performance on the dye decolourisation in real textile effluent and can be considered in a scale-up process at industrial level. Overall, the potential of Trichoderma strains in decolourising real textile dye present in textile effluent and the production of the oxidative enzymes Lac, LiP and MnP was demonstrated. Fungal strains are available in the collection e-catalogue to be further explored from the biotechnological point of view.
Tungsten Oxide Layers of High Acoustic Impedance for Fully Insulating Acoustic Reflectors

Gravimetric sensors based on solidly mounted resonators require fully insulating acoustic reflectors to avoid parasitics when operating in liquid media. In this work, we propose a new high-acoustic impedance material, tungsten oxide (WO3), for acoustic reflectors. We have optimized the sputtering conditions of WO3 to obtain nonconductive layers with mass density around 6700 kg/m3 and acoustic velocities for the shear and the longitudinal modes up to 2700 and 4500 m/s, respectively. Compared to other conventionally used high impedance layers, WO3 films display several manufacture advantages, such as high deposition rates, great reproducibility, and good adhesion to underlying substrates. We have demonstrated the applicability of WO3 in practical shear mode bulk acoustic wave resonators that display good performance in liquid environments.