Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paleoecotoxicology : Extending environmental toxicology and chemistry to the interpretation of the fossil record

Life appears to have developed in the Precambrian era, about 4,000 million years ago. Present day biodiversity is estimated to be more than 100 million species. The fossil record of nonmarine tetrapods from the Devonian era (approximately 400 million years ago) onward exhibits an average of about 50 families until the last quarter of the Cretaceous period, when the number of families increased to nearly 80, and the rise continued to the present 337 in several steps in the Tertiary [1]. A similar pattern of increase in the number of families was also found in the record of marine invertebrates [2]. Conversely, extinction throughout Earth’s history is generally estimated to include more than 90 to 99% of the species that ever lived. Thus, extinction is the rule rather than the exception, and the vast majority of these extinctions are considered to be normal or background extinctions since they have occurred regularly since life originated on Earth [1–3]. The fossil record of biota also reveals mass extinctions as distinct phenomena that resulted in a succession of family assemblages that dominated for a time and then were replaced. Mass extinctions are characterized by a drop in biodiversity that is believed to reflect an exceptional ecological crisis considered devastating to the biosphere. For example, at the end of the Permian era, some 250 million years ago, about 80% of species became extinct. Based on a detailed census of the end of the Permian event and the Cretaceous-Tertiary (C-T) mass extinction, everything from microscopic foraminifera to tetrapods seems to have vanished in just one ‘‘bad day’’ [2,4]. Many attempts have been made to understand these exceptional events based on evidence from the stratigraphic data on nonmarine tetrapods [1,3] as well as marine families [2]. When mass extinction episodes in marine families were fitted to the Harland et al. time scale [5], a cycle of approximately 28 million years could coincide with 7 of the 11 other peaks of presumed mass extinctions if the approach is centered on the C-T extinction. This astronomic scale–time pattern was linked to a large number of supposed cause and effect relationships such as: (1) regular cycles in terrestrial phenomena, including mantle, plate-tectonic, eustatic, atmospheric, and climatic processes and their concomitant effects on life history; (2) internal dynamics of the biological system, which lead to cyclical patterns of mass extinction; and (3) astronomic cycles, e.g., a hypothetical companion star of the Sun, called Nemesis, that disturb the Oort cloud and send a shower of comets hurtling towards Earth every 30 million years [3,6]. However, it is noteworthy that serious doubts exist on the scientific value of these assumptions; periodicity itself of the mass extinction phenomena could be mostly an artifact [7]. Although an overall controlling pattern or an ultimate cause that explains mass extinctions over the Phanerozoic era could be attractive, in-
Cluster analysis and patterns of findings on cranial magnetic resonance imaging of the elderly: the Cardiovascular Health Study.

OBJECTIVE To characterize patterns of findings on cranial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the elderly using a statistical technique called cluster analysis. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The Cardiovascular Health Study is a population-based, longitudinal study of 5888 people 65 years and older. Of these, 3230 underwent cranial MRI scans, which were coded for presence of infarcts and grades for white matter, ventricles, and sulci. Cluster analysis separated participants into 5 clusters based solely on patterns of MRI findings. Participants comprising each cluster were contrasted with respect to cardiovascular risk factors and clinical manifestations. RESULTS One cluster was low on all the MRI findings (normal) and another was high on all of them (complex infarcts). Another cluster had evidence for infarcts alone (simple infarcts), whereas the last 2 clusters lacked infarcts, one having enlarged ventricles and sulci (atrophy) and the other having prominent white matter changes and enlarged ventricles (leukoaraiosis). Factors that distinguished these clusters in a discriminant analysis were age, sex, several measures of hypertension, internal carotid artery wall thickness, smoking, and prevalent claudication before the MRI. The atrophy group had the highest percentage of men and the normal group had the lowest. Cognitive and motor performance also differed across clusters, with the atrophy cluster performing better than may have been expected. CONCLUSIONS These MRI patterns identified participants with different vascular disease risk factors and clinical manifestations. Results of these exploratory analyses warrant consideration in other populations of elderly people. Such patterns may provide clues about the pathophysiology of structural brain changes in the elderly.
Helping engineering students get jobs: Views from career services professionals

A diverse and highly skilled engineering workforce is needed to address today’s grand challenges involving sustainability, medicine, information technology, and learning. To grow such a workforce, research is needed to better grasp the decision-making of early career engineers as they seek their first post-undergraduate job. To aide in understanding this process, we first sought to understand the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that career service professionals believe are critical for students to develop. Accordingly, we analyzed semistructured qualitative interviews with career service professionals at two universities to answer the research questions: What knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) do career service professionals perceive as important for undergraduate engineering students during the process of applying to, being considered for, and obtaining a job offer? How do career services professionals help students gain these KSAs? Our findings suggest that both universities believe their school’s reputation insures employers that their engineering students will have sound engineering skills. In addition, they believe that acquiring a job offer requires a dynamic set of interactive abilities, such as marketing themselves and networking, which may not be addressed within the engineering curriculum or fully understood by students. Differences included approaches of optional versus required exposure to career services and philosophies of providing one-on-one assistance to proactively support students versus optional support designed to develop a student’s self-awareness. Our findings suggest that career service professionals use their beliefs about students as a basis for decisions on how to support students. Implications of our study include considerations for how we inform students regarding knowledge and skills associated with successfully obtaining a first job post-undergraduate degree and how those knowledge and skills may be different from ones necessary to obtain an engineering degree.
Optimizing bone health in cerebral palsy across the lifespan

SIR–We read with interest the new osteoporosis care pathway from the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine (AACPDM), highlighting the important issue of bone health in children with cerebral palsy (CP). The focus of the guidelines is on optimizing nutrition, vitamin D supplementation, encouraging weightbearing to promote skeletal development, and considering bisphosphonate administration as a preventive and therapeutic measure. We welcome the timely release of the guidelines, given that individuals with CP are living longer and are likely to develop osteoporosis as a consequence of factors beginning in childhood. With recent studies documenting increased skeletal fragility in adulthood, we would like to raise a number of points that may impact the assessment and management of bone health in childhood and transition to adulthood.
Almost optimal virtual machine placement for traffic intense data centers

The recent growing popularity of cloud-based solutions and the variety of new applications present new challenges for cloud management and resource utilization. In this paper we concentrate on the networking aspect and consider the placement problem of virtual machines (VMs) of applications with intense bandwidth requirements. Optimizing the available network bandwidth is far more complex than optimizing resources like memory or CPU, since every network link may be used by many physical hosts and thus by the VMs residing in these hosts. We focus on maximizing the benefit from the overall communication sent by the VMs to a single designated point in the data center (called the root). This is the typical case when considering a storage area network of applications with intense storage requirements. We formulate a bandwidth-constrained VM placement optimization problem that models this setting. This problem is NP hard, and we present a polynomial-time constant approximation algorithm for its most general version, in which hosts are connected to the root by a general network graph. For more practical cases, in which the network topology is a tree and the revenue is a simple function of the allocated bandwidth, we present improved approximation algorithms that are more efficient in terms of running time. We evaluate the expected performance of our proposed algorithms through a simulation study over traces from a real production data center, providing strong indications to the superiority of our proposed solutions.
Phylogenetic comparison of two polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-degrading mycobacteria

Two mycobacterial strains previously isolated from fossil-fuel-contaminated environments and shown to degrade four- and/or five-ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were further characterized. The two strains, PYR-I and RJGII-135, had similar growth characteristics, colony morphologies, and scotochromogenic pigmentations. DNA amplification fingerprints obtained with total genomic DNA indicated some strain similarities but with several distinctly different bands. Moreover, phylogenetic analysis based upon essentially full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences separates the two strains as distinct species within the fast-growing group of mycobacteria. Although both strains are thermosensitive, strain PYR-I has the bulged U between positions 184 and 193 characteristic of thermotolerant mycobacteria. Both strains are of potential use for reintroduction into and bioremediation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-contaminated soils.
-io Nouns through the Ages. Analysing Latin Morphological Productivity with Lemlat

English. This paper aims at examining the diachronic distribution of one of the richest classes of nouns in Latin, namely those ending in -io. The work is performed through the combined use of a morphological analyser for Latin (Lemlat), and a database collecting all word forms occurring through different periods of Latin language (TF-CILF). Italiano. Questo articolo presenta un’analisi della distribuzione diacronica di una delle più ricche classi di nomi in latino, ossia quelli che terminano in -io. Metodologicamente, il lavoro viene condotto attraverso l’uso incrociato di un analizzatore morfologico per il latino (Lemlat) e di una risorsa lessicale contenente tutte le forme di parole latine che occorrono in testi che vanno dall’antichità al neo-latino (TF-CILF).
A Lectin HPLC Method to Enrich Selectively-glycosylated Peptides from Complex Biological Samples

Glycans are an important class of post-translational modifications. Typically found on secreted and extracellular molecules, glycan structures signal the internal status of the cell. Glycans on tumor cells tend to have abundant sialic acid and fucose moieties. We propose that these cancer-associated glycan variants be exploited for biomarker development aimed at diagnosing early-stage disease. Accordingly, we developed a mass spectrometry-based workflow that incorporates chromatography on affinity matrices formed from lectins, proteins that bind specific glycan structures. The lectins Sambucus nigra (SNA) and Aleuria aurantia (AAL), which bind sialic acid and fucose, respectively, were covalently coupled to POROS beads (Applied Biosystems) and packed into PEEK columns for high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). Briefly, plasma was depleted of the fourteen most abundant proteins using a multiple affinity removal system (MARS-14; Agilent). Depleted plasma was trypsin-digested and separated into flow-through and bound fractions by SNA or AAL HPLC. The fractions were treated with PNGaseF to remove N-linked glycans, and analyzed by LC-MS/MS on a QStar Elite. Data were analyzed using Mascot software. The experimental design included positive controls—fucosylated and sialylated human lactoferrin glycopeptides—and negative controls—high mannose glycopeptides from Saccharomyces cerevisiae—that were used to monitor the specificity of lectin capture. Key features of this workflow include the reproducibility derived from the HPLC format, the positive identification of the captured and PNGaseF-treated glycopeptides from their deamidated Asn-Xxx-Ser/Thr motifs, and quality assessment using glycoprotein standards. Protocol optimization also included determining the appropriate ratio of starting material to column capacity, identifying the most efficient capture and elution buffers, and monitoring the PNGaseF-treatment to ensure full deglycosylation. Future directions include using this workflow to perform mass spectrometry-based discovery experiments on plasma from breast cancer patients and control individuals.
Correlation Between Respiratory Colonization With Gram-Negative Bacteria and Development of Gram-Negative Bacterial Infection After Cardiac Surgery

This pilot, observational study involving 286 patients who underwent cardiac surgery found that patients who had endotracheal colonization with gram-negative bacteria at 1 week after surgery were more likely to develop subsequent infection compared to those without colonization (8 of 23 vs. 4 of 40; relative risk 2.3 [95% confidence interval, 1.3–4.1; P value < .05]).
Practice Prize Paper - Incorporating Emotions into Evaluation and Choice Models: Application to Kmart Australia

This paper addresses the repositioning of Kmart Australia in 2011. It shows how by calibrating emotional as well as cognitive reactions and estimating their impact on purchase intentions, Kmart was able to focus its communications, improving market share. We measure nine key emotions, ranging from surprise to anger. Including these emotions significantly improves our model for likelihood to choose a store. Measuring emotions enabled Kmart’s advertising agency to create a television commercial that tapped into the specific emotions that most strongly predict the likelihood to choose a store; that is, the model drove the development of the advertising creative. The resulting television commercial tested well and was effective when launched. At the individual level, cognitions and emotions changed dramatically. At the aggregate level, an econometric model showed that store visits were significantly enhanced. Kmart’s EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) increased by 30%, whereas Kmart’s main rival had almost no EBIT growth, despite vigorous attempts to counter Kmart’s campaign. One of our key contributions is to incorporate emotions into marketing science models of evaluation and purchase intentions. We also provide a new methodology to measure emotions. The approach enables marketing science to participate in the design of marketing stimuli, rather than just testing preexisting ones.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi. org/10.1287/mksc.2015. 0954 .
CD73+ regulatory T cells contribute to adenosine‐mediated resolution of acute lung injury

Acute lung injury (ALI) is characterized by alveolar injury and uncontrolled inflammation. Since most cases of ALI resolve spontaneously, understanding the endogenous mechanisms that promote ALI resolution is important to developing effective therapies. Previous studies have implicated extracellular adenosine signaling in tissue adaptation and wound healing. Therefore, we hypothesized a functional contribution for the endogenous production of adenosine during ALI resolution. As a model, we administered intratracheal LPS and observed peak lung injury at 3 d, with resolution by d 14. Treatment with pegylated adenosine‐deaminase to enhance extracellular adenosine breakdown revealed impaired ALI resolution. Similarly, genetic deletion of cd73, the pacemaker for extracellular adenosine generation, was associated with increased mortality (0% wild‐type and 40% in cd73–/– mice; P<0.05) and failure to resolve ALI adequately. Studies of inflammatory cell trafficking into the lungs during ALI resolution revealed that regulatory T cells (Tregs) express the highest levels of CD73. While Treg numbers in cd73–/– mice were similar to controls, cd73‐deficient Tregs had attenuated immunosuppressive functions. Moreover, adoptive transfer of cd73‐deficient Tregs into Rag–/– mice emulated the observed phenotype in cd73–/– mice, while transfer of wild‐type Tregs was associated with normal ALI resolution. Together, these studies implicate CD73‐dependent adenosine generation in Tregs in promoting ALI resolution. —Ehrentraut, H. , Clambey, E. T. , McNamee, E. N. , Brodsky, K. S. , Ehrentraut, S. F. , Poth, J. M. , Riegel, A. K. , Westrich, J. A. , Colgan, S. P., Eltzschig, H. K. CD73+ regulatory T cells contribute to adenosine‐mediated resolution of acute lung injury. FASEB J. 27, 2207–2219 (2013). www.fasebj. org
β‐cell differentiation status in type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) affects 415 million people worldwide and is characterized by chronic hyperglycaemia and insulin resistance, progressing to insufficient insulin production, as a result of β‐cell failure. Over time, chronic hyperglycaemia can ultimately lead to loss of β‐cell function, leaving patients insulin‐dependent. Until recently the loss of β‐cell mass seen in T2D was considered to be the result of increased rates of apoptosis; however, it has been proposed that apoptosis alone cannot account for the extent of β‐cell mass loss seen in the disease, and that a loss of function may also occur as a result of changes in β‐cell differentiation status. In the present review, we consider current knowledge of determinants of β‐cell fate in the context of understanding its relevance to disease process in T2D, and also the impact of a diabetogenic environment (hyperglycaemia, hypoxia, inflammation and dyslipidaemia) on the expression of genes involved in maintenance of β‐cell identity. We describe current knowledge of the impact of the diabetic microenvironment on gene regulatory processes such alternative splicing, the expression of disallowed genes and epigenetic modifications. Elucidating the molecular mechanisms that underpin changes to β‐cell differentiation status and the concomitant β‐cell failure offers potential treatment targets for the future management of patients with T2D.
A novel operational amplifier for low-voltage low-power SC circuits

A novel low-voltage two-stage operational amplifier employing class-AB architecture is presented. The structure utilizes level-shifters to create the class-AB behavior in the first and second stages. With this structure, the transconductances (gm) of the two stages are double compared with the normal configuration without class-AB behaviors with the same current consumption. Thus power can be saved and the operation frequency can be increased. The nested cascode miller compensation and symmetric common-mode feedback circuits are used for large unit-gain bandwidth, good phase margin and stability. Simulation results present the sample-and-hold (S/H) of the 11-bit 40-MHz pipelined ADC using the proposed amplifier consumes only 5.5mW from 1.2V power supply with signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio(SNDR) 78.78 dB, spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) 87.2 dB and total harmonic distortion (THD) -85.9 dB with 19.1MHz full-swing input signal.
JASIS and Library and Information Science Journal Rankings: A Review and Analysis of the Last Half-Century

The concept of journal ranking is explained along with the theoretical and practical significance of ranking journals. An eight-variable model for classifying journal-ranking studies is outlined. A review of LIS journal rankings of the last half-century identifies 178 published between 1952 and 1997. The majority of these used some type of citation measure, followed by rankings based on production, subjective judgment, and reading, respectively. Analysis of JASIS's, and its immediate predecessor, American Documentation's, position in these rankings, found that they were logically excluded from 18. In the remaining 160, they ranked first in 20 and in the top five in 88. It is noted that JASIS also appears on many lists of “core” LIS journals, and that it has been the object of investigation in numerous studies.
Fine Structure of Thermus aquaticus, an Extreme Thermophile

Electron microscopic studies using thin sections revealed that Thermus aquaticus has a structure similar to that of most other gram-negative bacteria. The cell envelope is tripartite: plasma membrane, thin middle layer, and a thicker and irregular outer layer. The outer layer appears to be joined to the plasma membrane by a series of connections and, when seen in tangential section, the outer layer appears as a series of parallel bands. The cell division mechanism resembles that of typical gram-negative bacteria. Large spherical bodies designated “rotund bodies” are formed as a result of the association of a number of separate cells. In this association the outer envelope layers of the cells fuse and pull away from the middle layer. The rotund body thus appears as a series of rods, usually lying in parallel around the periphery of the sphere, completely connected by means of the fused outer layer.
PAM Representation of Ternary Continuous Phase Modulation

It is well-known that binary continuous phase modulation (CPM) waveforms can be exactly represented as a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) waveforms. This has also been shown for nonbinary CPM waveforms with even-sized symbol alphabets. In this paper we show how this is also accomplished for ternary CPM waveforms. We focus the development on signals with shorter frequency pulses, since these cases have the most practical value in designing reduced-complexity detectors. However, we also show the pattern by which these results can be extended to arbitrary frequency pulse durations and also to arbitrary odd-sized symbol alphabets, although little practical value is perceived in either of these extensions. We conclude with a thorough application of the results using the ternary CPM waveform SOQPSK-TG, which is an aeronautical telemetry standard
A study of TDOA estimation using Matrix Pencil algorithms and IEEE 802.11ac

The IEEE 802.11ac is an emerging WLAN standard for the 5 GHz band in which multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and wider channel bandwidths are enhanced compared to 802.11n. In this paper, we present some techniques for estimating the time difference of arrival (TDOA) associated with signals in a multipath communication channel for wireless indoor positioning. Recently, the Unitary Matrix Pencil (UMP) and the Beam-Space Matrix Pencil (BMP) algorithms have been presented to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of coherent or non-coherent signals using uniform linear arrays (ULA). We have applied these algorithms for TDOA estimation using OFDM systems. The accuracy, stability, and complexity of various MP algorithms are investigated using the 802.11ac standard, and compared to the corresponding performance of 802.11n. The performance of using multiple OFDM training symbols and wider channel bandwidths are emphasized. Experimental results show that accuracy and stability in the range of a few hundreds of picoseconds have been achieved.