Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Release of Pleurotus ostreatus Versatile-Peroxidase from Mn2+ Repression Enhances Anthropogenic and Natural Substrate Degradation

The versatile-peroxidase (VP) encoded by mnp4 is one of the nine members of the manganese-peroxidase (MnP) gene family that constitutes part of the ligninolytic system of the white-rot basidiomycete Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom). VP enzymes exhibit dual activity on a wide range of substrates. As Mn2+ supplement to P. ostreatus cultures results in enhanced degradation of recalcitrant compounds and lignin, we examined the effect of Mn2+ on the expression profile of the MnP gene family. In P. ostreatus (monokaryon PC9), mnp4 was found to be the predominantly expressed mnp in Mn2+-deficient media, whereas strongly repressed (to approximately 1%) in Mn2+-supplemented media. Accordingly, in-vitro Mn2+-independent activity was found to be negligible. We tested whether release of mnp4 from Mn2+ repression alters the activity of the ligninolytic system. A transformant over-expressing mnp4 (designated OEmnp4) under the control of the β-tubulin promoter was produced. Now, despite the presence of Mn2+ in the medium, OEmnp4 produced mnp4 transcript as well as VP activity as early as 4 days after inoculation. The level of expression was constant throughout 10 days of incubation (about 0.4-fold relative to β-tubulin) and the activity was comparable to the typical activity of PC9 in Mn2+-deficient media. In-vivo decolorization of the azo dyes Orange II, Reactive Black 5, and Amaranth by OEmnp4 preceded that of PC9. OEmnp4 and PC9 were grown for 2 weeks under solid-state fermentation conditions on cotton stalks as a lignocellulosic substrate. [14C]-lignin mineralization, in-vitro dry matter digestibility, and neutral detergent fiber digestibility were found to be significantly higher (about 25%) in OEmnp4-fermented substrate, relative to PC9. We conclude that releasing Mn2+ suppression of VP4 by over-expression of the mnp4 gene in P. ostreatus improved its ligninolytic functionality.
Algorithm for Fuzzy Maximum Flow Problem in Hyper-Network Setting

Maximum flow problem on hypergraphs (hyper-networks) is an extension of maximum flow problem on nor- mal graphs. In this paper, we consider a generalized fuzzy version of maximum flow problem in hyper-networks setting. Our algorithm is a class of genetic algorithms and based on genetic tricks. The crisp equivalents of fuzzy chance con- straints in hyper-networks setting are defined, and the execution steps of encoding and decoding are presented. Finally, we manifest the implement procedure.
Bitcoin Meets Collective Signing

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that leverages scalable collective signing to commit Bitcoin transactions irreversibly within seconds. ByzCoin achieves Byzantine consensus while preserving Bitcoin's open membership by dynamically forming hash power-proportionate consensus groups that represent recently-successful block miners. ByzCoin employs communication trees to optimize transaction commitment and verification under normal operation while guaranteeing safety and liveness under Byzantine faults, up to a near-optimal tolerance of f faulty group members among 3f + 2 total. ByzCoin mitigates double spending and selfish mining attacks by producing collectively signed transaction blocks within one minute of transaction submission. Tree-structured communication further reduces this latency to less than 30 seconds. Due to these optimizations, ByzCoin achieves a throughput higher than PayPal currently handles, with a confirmation latency of 15-20 seconds.
Providing Sport Psychology Consulting Services in Professional Hockey

This article relates experiences and knowledge gained in providing sport psychology consulting services to professional hockey teams over a 6-year period. The process of getting involved in professional hockey is described and the importance of obtaining ample consulting experience before working with professional athletes is discussed. Philosophical and organizational components of service delivery are presented along with the range and type of service provided. The development of trust and confidence in the player/consultant relationship is seen as the key to effective sport psychology consulting. Also, the importance of being able to read situations, fit into the professional sports environment, and adopt a low-key, behind-the-scenes approach is discussed.
Filling Vacancies: Identifying the Most Efficient Recruitment Channel

This paper provides new results on the recruitment behaviour of firms by showing that recruitment channels clearly affect the probability of filling a vacancy. Using a French data, we estimate the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies, taking into account that recruitment channels choices are endogenous and that firms strategically combine several channels. Our results enable us to conclude that institutional intermediaries, such as private and public employment agencies, are found to be the most effective channels for firms. However, these intermediaries are specialized, in that private agencies are more efficient at filling skilled vacancies, whereas public agencies are more efficient at filling non-skilled vacancies.
Memory Consolidation of Auditory Pavlovian Fear Conditioning Requires Protein Synthesis and Protein Kinase A in the Amygdala

Previous studies have shown that long-term potentiation (LTP) can be induced in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA) after stimulation of central auditory pathways and that auditory fear conditioning modifies neural activity in the LA in a manner similar to LTP. The present experiments examined whether intra-LA administration of inhibitors of protein synthesis or protein kinase A (PKA) activity, treatments that block LTP in hippocampus, interfere with memory consolidation of fear conditioning. In the first series of experiments, rats received a single conditioning trial followed immediately by intra-LA infusions of anisomycin (a protein synthesis inhibitor) or Rp-cAMPS (an inhibitor of PKA activity) and were tested 24 hr later. Results indicated that immediate post-training infusion of either drug dose-dependently impaired fear memory retention, whereas infusions 6 hr after conditioning had no effect. Additional experiments showed that anisomycin and Rp-cAMPS interfered with long-term memory (LTM), but not short-term memory (STM), of fear and that the effect on LTM was specific to memory consolidation processes rather than to deficits in sensory or performance processes. Findings suggest that the LA is essential for memory consolidation of auditory fear conditioning and that this process is PKA and protein-synthesis dependent.
Semi-automated Curation of Metabolic Models via Flux Balance Analysis: A Case Study with Mycoplasma gallisepticum

Primarily used for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, genome-scale metabolic modeling shows tremendous potential as a tool for fundamental research and curation of metabolism. Through a novel integration of flux balance analysis and genetic algorithms, a strategy to curate metabolic networks and facilitate identification of metabolic pathways that may not be directly inferable solely from genome annotation was developed. Specifically, metabolites involved in unknown reactions can be determined, and potentially erroneous pathways can be identified. The procedure developed allows for new fundamental insight into metabolism, as well as acting as a semi-automated curation methodology for genome-scale metabolic modeling. To validate the methodology, a genome-scale metabolic model for the bacterium Mycoplasma gallisepticum was created. Several reactions not predicted by the genome annotation were postulated and validated via the literature. The model predicted an average growth rate of 0.358±0.12, closely matching the experimentally determined growth rate of M. gallisepticum of 0.244±0.03. This work presents a powerful algorithm for facilitating the identification and curation of previously known and new metabolic pathways, as well as presenting the first genome-scale reconstruction of M. gallisepticum.
Ergodic capacity of the slotted amplify and forward relay channel with finite relays

In this paper we investigate the capacity of a general class of the slotted amplify and forward (SAF) relaying protocol where multiple, though a finite number of relays may transmit in a given cooperative slot and the relay terminals being half-duplex have a finite slot memory capacity. We derive an expression for the capacity per channel use of this generalized SAF channel assuming all source to relay, relay to destination and source to destination channel gains are independent and modeled as complex Gaussian. We show through the analysis of eigenvalue distributions that the increase in limiting capacity per channel use is marginal with the increase of relay terminals.
Dating Violence, Childhood Maltreatment, and BMI From Adolescence to Young Adulthood

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: This study tested whether dating violence (DV) victimization is associated with increases in BMI across the transition from adolescence to young adulthood and whether gender and previous exposure to child maltreatment modify such increases. METHODS: Data were from participants (N = 9295; 49.9% female) in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. BMI was calculated from measured height and weight at waves 2, 3, and 4 of the study. DV victimization was measured at waves 2, 3, and 4 by using items from the revised Conflict Tactics Scales. Linear regression by using generalized estimating equations with robust SEs was used to test the association. Models were stratified according to gender and history of child maltreatment. RESULTS: From baseline to wave 4, BMI increased on average 6.5 units (95% confidence interval [CI]: 6.2–6.7) and 6.8 units (95% CI: 6.5–7.1) among men and women, respectively, and nearly one-half (45.5% of men; 43.9% of women) reported DV at some point. In stratified models, DV victimization (β: 0.3 [95% CI: 0.0–0.6]) independently predicted BMI increase over time in women. Exposure to childhood sexual abuse magnified the increase in BMI associated with DV victimization (β: 1.3 [95% CI: 0.3–2.3]). No other types of childhood maltreatment were significant modifiers of the DV–BMI association. Violence victimization was not associated with BMI among men. CONCLUSIONS: Screening and support for DV victims, especially women who have also experienced childhood maltreatment, may be warranted to reduce the likelihood of health consequences associated with victimization.
Local Ranking Problem on the BrowseGraph

The "Local Ranking Problem" (LRP) is related to the computation of a centrality-like rank on a local graph, where the scores of the nodes could significantly differ from the ones computed on the global graph. Previous work has studied LRP on the hyperlink graph but never on the BrowseGraph, namely a graph where nodes are webpages and edges are browsing transitions. Recently, this graph has received more and more attention in many different tasks such as ranking, prediction and recommendation. However, a web-server has only the browsing traffic performed on its pages (local BrowseGraph) and, as a consequence, the local computation can lead to estimation errors, which hinders the increasing number of applications in the state of the art. Also, although the divergence between the local and global ranks has been measured, the possibility of estimating such divergence using only local knowledge has been mainly overlooked. These aspects are of great interest for online service providers who want to: (i) gauge their ability to correctly assess the importance of their resources only based on their local knowledge, and (ii) take into account real user browsing fluxes that better capture the actual user interest than the static hyperlink network. We study the LRP problem on a BrowseGraph from a large news provider, considering as subgraphs the aggregations of browsing traces of users coming from different domains. We show that the distance between rankings can be accurately predicted based only on structural information of the local graph, being able to achieve an average rank correlation as high as 0.8.
Provided for Non-commercial Research and Educational Use Only. Not for Reproduction, Distribution or Commercial Use. External Adjustment, Global Imbalances, Valuation Effects *

research, and educational use. This includes without limitation use in instruction at your institution, distribution to specific colleagues, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's permissions site at: Abstract We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long-term capital flows, global imbalances, and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in size and discuss implications for the international monetary and financial system.
The Predicted Impact of Heart Disease Prevention and Treatment Initiatives on Mortality in Lithuania, a Middle-Income Country

Introduction Disease-prevention programs compete with disease-treatment programs for scarce resources. This analysis predicts the impact of heart disease prevention and treatment initiatives for Lithuania, a middle-income Baltic country of 3.3 million people. Methods To perform the analysis, we used data from clinical trials, the Lithuanian mortality registry, the Kaunas Monitoring of Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Disease (MONICA) register, Kaunas University Hospital and, when data from Lithuania were not available, the United States. We used the predicted reduction in all-cause mortality (as potentially postponable deaths) per 100,000 people aged 35 to 64 years as our outcome measure. Results The number of potentially postponable deaths from risk factor prevention and management in the population without apparent heart disease is 556.3 (plausible range, 282.3-878.1). The number of potentially postponable deaths for people with stable heart disease is 280.4 (plausible range, 90.8-521.8), 7.0 with a public-access defibrillator program (plausible range, 3.8-8.9), and 119.0 for hospitalized patients (plausible range, 15.9-297.7). Conclusion Although improving treatment of acute events will benefit individual patients, the potential impact on the larger population is modest. Only programs that prevent and manage risk factors can generate large declines in mortality. Significant reductions in both cardiac and noncardiac death magnify the impact of risk-factor prevention and management.
Using Machine Learning Algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation: A Brief Survey

In the entire vocabulary of Human language, numerous words have more than one distinct meaning and thus present a contextual ambiguity which is a worth of one of the many language based problems needs procedure based resolution. Approaches to WSD are often classified according to the main source of knowledge used in sense differentiation. Methods that rely primarily on dictionaries, thesauri, and lexical knowledge bases, without using any corpus evidence, are termed dictionary-based or knowledge based. Natural language tends to be ambiguous. Comparing and evaluating different WSD systems is extremely difficult, because of the different test sets, sense inventories, and knowledge resources adopted. In this research we shall address the problem of Word Sense Disambiguation by a combination of learning algorithms. The study is aimed at comparing the performance of using machine learning algorithms for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD).
Distributed Multi-Interface Computing with Polyglot

We introduce an architecture for multi-interface computing systems. Our architecture, based on distributed objects, allows networked presenters—programs providing user interfaces—to be connected to or disconnected from running applications. Furthermore, several presenters may be simultaneously attached to the same application, and they need not support the same user interface “style,” so conforming applications can, without recoding, exploit new interface technologies, and third parties can introduce new user interfaces for applications. These capabilities are highly relevant to future systems, in which migratory programs (agents), mobile computing, and providing ubiquitous access for all users (including people with disabilities) are critical. We present a prototype implementation and example application (spreadsheet) to demonstrate the architecture’s power, and discuss plans for future extensions.
Smooth meshes for sketch-based freeform modeling

This paper describes a framework for introducing visually smooth surfaces into sketch-based freeform modeling systems. An existing sketch-based freeform modeling system generates rough polygonal meshes with uneven triangulations after each operation. Our approach generates a dense, visually smooth polygonal mesh by beautifying and refining the original rough mesh. A beautification process generates near-equilateral triangles with a near-uniform distribution of vertices to mask the noise and bad sampling of the uneven mesh. The vertices are distributed on a smoothed surface that approximately interpolates the original mesh. Refinement generates a smooth, dense mesh by subdividing the beautified mesh and moving the vertices to the interpolative surface. The smooth interpolative surface is computed via implicit quadratic surfaces that best fit the mesh locally in a least-squares sense.
Maintenance of self‐renewal ability of mouse embryonic stem cells in the absence of DNA methyltransferases Dnmt1, Dnmt3a and Dnmt3b

DNA methyltransferases Dnmt1, Dnmt3a and Dnmt3b cooperatively regulate cytosine methylation in CpG dinucleotides in mammalian genomes, providing an epigenetic basis for gene silencing and maintenance of genome integrity. Proper CpG methylation is required for the normal growth of various somatic cell types, indicating its essential role in the basic cellular function of mammalian cells. Previous studies using Dnmt1−/– or Dnmt3a−/–Dnmt3b−/– ES cells, however, have shown that undifferentiated embryonic stem (ES) cells can tolerate hypomethylation for their proliferation. In an attempt to investigate the effects of the complete loss of CpG DNA methyltransferase function, we established mouse ES cells lacking all three of these enzymes by gene targeting. Despite the absence of CpG methylation, as demonstrated by genome‐wide methylation analysis, these triple knockout (TKO) ES cells grew robustly and maintained their undifferentiated characteristics. TKO ES cells retained pericentromeric heterochromatin domains marked with methylation at Lys9 of histone H3 and heterochromatin protein‐1, and maintained their normal chromosome numbers. Our results indicate that ES cells can maintain stem cell properties and chromosomal stability in the absence of CpG methylation and CpG DNA methyltransferases.
Stochastic Meta Descent in online kernel methods

Learning System is a method to approximate an underlying function from a finite observation data. Since batch learning has a disadvantage in dealing with large data set, online learning is proposed to prevent the computational expensive. Iterative method called Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is applied to solve for the underlying function on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). To use SGD in time-verying environment, a learning rate is adjusted by Stochastic Meta Descent (SMD). The simulation results show that SMD can follow shifting and switching target function whereas the size of model can be restricted using sparse solution.
Categorization and Similarity Analysis : Implementation and Evaluation

Executive Summary This report covers the implementation of software that aims to identify document versions and semantically related documents. This is important due to the increasing amount of digital information. Key criteria were that the software was fast and required limited disk space. Previous research determined that the Simhash algorithm was the most appropriate for this application so this method was implemented. The structure of each component was well defined with the inputs and outputs constant and the result was a software system that can have interchangeable parts if required. The software was tested on three document corpuses to try and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the calculations used. Initial modifications were made to parameters such as the size of shingles and the length of hash value to ensure hash values were unique and unrelated phrases were not hashed to similar values. Not surprisingly longer hash values gave more accuracy and the run-time was not increased significantly. Increasing shingle size also gave a better reflection of the uniqueness of each input phrase. The naive implementation performed moderately on a custom made document version corpus but the similarity values were low for documents with only a few word changes. Using a similarity measure based on the Jaccard Index was more accurate. The software was able to successfully identify most document versions correctly and only had issues with the merging and separating of paragraphs. A theoretical solution was described for how this issue could be resolved. Testing for semantically similar documents was limited compared to the testing for versions as finding document versions was identified as the focus. Initial testing showed that hashing the extracted entities for each paragraph returned values with limited information for each paragraph. Future work should analyse the entities at document level rather than paragraph level.
A Formal Analysis of Required Cooperation in Multi-Agent Planning

It is well understood that,through cooperation, multiple agents can achieve tasks that are unachievable by a single agent.However, there are no formal characterizations of situations where cooperation is required to achieve a goal, thus warranting the application of multiple agents. In this paper, we provide such a formal characterization for multi-agent planning problems with sequential action execution. We first show that determining whether there is required cooperation (RC) is in general intractable even in this limited setting. As a result, we start our analysis with a subset of more restrictive problems where agents are homogeneous.For such problems, we identify two conditions that can cause RC. We establish that when none of these conditions hold, the problem is single-agent solvable;otherwise, we provide upper bounds on the minimum number of agents required. For the remaining problems with heterogeneous agents, we further divide them into two subsets.For one of the subsets,we propose the concept of {\em transformer agent} to reduce the number of agents to be considered which is used to improve planning performance.We implemented a planner using our theoretical results and compared it with one of the best IPC CoDMAP planners in the centralized track.Results show that our planner provides significantly improved performance on IPC CoDMAP domains.