Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Querying NoSQL-based Crowdsourcing Systems Efficiently

In this paper, we provide a novel approach for effectively and efficiently support query processing tasks in novel NoSQL crowdsourcing systems. The idea of our method is to exploit the social knowledge available from reviews about products of any kind, freely provided by customers through specialized web sites. We thus define a NoSQL database system for large collections of product reviews, where queries can be expressed in terms of natural language sentences whose answers are modeled as lists of products ranked based on the relevance of reviews w.r. t. the natural language sentences. The best ranked products in the result list can be seen as the best hints for the user based on crowd opinions (the reviews). By exploiting the well-known IMDb dataset, which comprises more than 2 million reviews for more than 100,000 movies, we experimentally shows that our prototype obtains good performance in terms of execution time, demonstrating that our approach is feasible. �
Family Caregivers’ Experiences and Involvement with Cancer Pain Management

The purpose of this descriptive cross-sectional study was to describe family caregiver involvement in and perceptions of cancer pain management. A consecutively recruited cohort of 75 patient-caregiver dyads attending an outpatient oncology clinic completed self-report questionnaires comprising standardized and investigator-developed measures of pain behaviours and experiences. Family caregivers reported high levels of confidence and willingness to participate in pain management, and extensive involvement in pain management activities including supporting, decision making, and communicating about pain. At the same time, many caregivers experienced a great deal of distress and some difficulties in performing these activities. The significance and scope of these caregiving experiences suggest that developing the caregiver's ability to effectively contribute to pain management is an important priority in efforts to improve cancer pain management.
Reverse engineering gene networks: Integrating genetic perturbations with dynamical modeling

While the fundamental building blocks of biology are being tabulated by the various genome projects, microarray technology is setting the stage for the task of deducing the connectivity of large-scale gene networks. We show how the perturbation of carefully chosen genes in a microarray experiment can be used in conjunction with a reverse engineering algorithm to reveal the architecture of an underlying gene regulatory network. Our iterative scheme identifies the network topology by analyzing the steady-state changes in gene expression resulting from the systematic perturbation of a particular node in the network. We highlight the validity of our reverse engineering approach through the successful deduction of the topology of a linear in numero gene network and a recently reported model for the segmentation polarity network in Drosophila melanogaster. Our method may prove useful in identifying and validating specific drug targets and in deconvolving the effects of chemical compounds.
XUXEN: A Spelling Checker/Corrector for Basque Based on Two-Level Morphology

The application of the formalism of two-level morphology to Basque and its use in the elaboration of the XUXEN spelling checker/corrector are described. This application is intended to cover a large part of the language.Because Basque is a highly inflected language, the approach of spelling checking and correction has been conceived as a by-product of a general purpose morphological analyzer/generator. This analyzer is taken as a basic tool for current and future work on automatic processing of Basque.An extension for continuation class specifications in order to deal with long-distance dependencies is proposed. This extension consists basically of two features added to the standard formalism which allow the lexicon builder to make explicit the interdependencies of morphemes.User-lexicons can be interactively enriched with new entries enabling the checker from then on to recognize all the possible flexions derived from them.Due to a late process of standardization of the language, writers don't always know the standard form to be used and commit errors. The treatment of these "typical errors" is made in a specific way by means of describing them using the two-level lexicon system. In this sense, XUXEN is intended as a useful tool for standardization purposes of present day written Basque.
A Simple Algorithm for Mal'tsev Constraints

A Mal'tsev operation is a ternary operation $\varphi$ that satisfies the identities $\varphi(x,y,y) = \varphi(y,y,x) = x$. Constraint satisfaction problems involving constraints invariant under a Mal'tsev operation constitute an important class of constraint satisfaction problems, which includes the affine satisfiability problem, subgroup and near subgroup constraints, and many others. It is also known that any tractable case of the counting constraint satisfaction problem involves only Mal'tsev constraints. The first algorithm solving the arbitrary constraint satisfaction problem with Mal'tsev constraints has been given by Bulatov. However, this algorithm is very sophisticated and relies heavily on advanced algebraic machinery. In this paper, we give a different and much simpler algorithm for this type of constraint.
A game theoretic approach to controller design for hybrid systems

We present a method to design controllers for safety specifications in hybrid systems. The hybrid system combines discrete event dynamics with nonlinear continuous dynamics: the discrete event dynamics model linguistic and qualitative information and naturally accommodate mode switching logic, and the continuous dynamics model the physical processes themselves, such as the continuous response of an aircraft to the forces of aileron and throttle. Input variables model both continuous and discrete control and disturbance parameters. We translate safety specifications into restrictions on the system's reachable sets of states. Then, using analysis based on optimal control and game theory for automata and continuous dynamical systems, we derive Hamilton-Jacobi equations whose solutions describe the boundaries of reachable sets. These equations are the heart of our general controller synthesis technique for hybrid systems, in which we calculate feedback control laws for the continuous and discrete variables, which guarantee that the hybrid system remains in the "safe subset" of the reachable set. We discuss issues related to computing solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi equations. Throughout, we demonstrate out techniques on examples of hybrid automata modeling aircraft conflict resolution, autopilot flight mode switching, and vehicle collision avoidance.
Quorum Sensing Inhibition Selects for Virulence and Cooperation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

With the rising development of bacterial resistance the search for new medical treatments beyond conventional antimicrobials has become a key aim of public health research. Possible innovative strategies include the inhibition of bacterial virulence. However, consideration must be given to the evolutionary and environmental consequences of such new interventions. Virulence and cooperative social behaviour of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa rely on the quorum-sensing (QS) controlled production of extracellular products (public goods). Hence QS is an attractive target for anti-virulence interventions. During colonization, non-cooperating (and hence less virulent) P. aeruginosa QS-mutants, benefiting from public goods provided by wild type isolates, naturally increase in frequency providing a relative protection from invasive infection. We hypothesized that inhibition of QS-mediated gene expression removes this growth advantage and selection of less virulent QS-mutants, and maintains the predominance of more virulent QS-wild type bacteria. We addressed this possibility in a placebo-controlled trial investigating the anti-QS properties of azithromycin, a macrolide antibiotic devoid of bactericidal activity on P. aeruginosa, but interfering with QS, in intubated patients colonized by P. aeruginosa. In the absence of azithromycin, non-cooperating (and hence less virulent) lasR (QS)-mutants increased in frequency over time. Azithromycin significantly reduced QS-gene expression measured directly in tracheal aspirates. Concomitantly the advantage of lasR-mutants was lost and virulent wild-type isolates predominated during azithromycin treatment. We confirmed these results in vitro with fitness and invasion experiments. Azithromycin reduced growth rate of the wild-type, but not of the lasR-mutant. Furthermore, the lasR-mutant efficiently invaded wild-type populations in the absence, but not in the presence of azithromycin. These in vivo and in vitro results demonstrate that anti-virulence interventions based on QS-blockade diminish natural selection towards reduced virulence and therefore may increase the prevalence of more virulent genotypes in the Hospital environment. More generally, the impact of intervention on the evolution of virulence of pathogenic bacteria should be assessed. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00610623
Modeling Information Access in Construct

Literacy and other interaction mechanisms have been shown to be important factors in determining whether and how individuals interact with printed and other forms of media. This lack of access to – or in cases, misinformation from – such types of media has an important social component for Construct modeling. This technical report describes the information access features in Construct, both from an algorithmic and input perspective. It describes the literacy model implemented in Construct, as well as the internet access and newspaper readership modifications to past interventions. This document is intended primarily as a reference guide for literacy and access modeling in Construct, and assumes at least some familiarity with the Construct modeling environment. A short example experiment using the literacy mechanism is described towards the end of this report. This work was supported in part by the IRS project in Computational Modeling and the NSF IGERT in CASOS (DGE 997276). In addition support for Construct was provided in part by Office of Naval Research (N00014-06-1-0104), the National Science Foundation (SES-0452487), and the AirForce Office of Sponsored Research (MURI: Cultural Modeling of the Adversary, 600322) for research in the area of dynamic network analysis. Additional support was provided by CASOS the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Lab or the U.S. government.
Life span extension by resveratrol, rapamycin, and metformin: The promise of dietary restriction mimetics for an healthy aging

Life expectancy at the turn of the 20th century was 46 years on average worldwide and it is around 65 years today. The correlative increase in age‐associated diseases incidence has a profound public health impact and is an important matter of concern for our societies. Aging is a complex, heterogeneous, and multifactorial phenomenon, which is the consequence of multiple interactions between genes and environment. In this review, we survey animals models that have been of great help for both investigating mechanism of aging and identifying molecules, which slow down the onset of age‐related diseases. Resveratrol (RSV) is one of those. We will report evidences supporting RSV as a molecule that acts by mimicking the beneficial effects of dietary restriction, and may share common downstream targets with rapamycin and metformin. Although those molecules do not reveal all the secrets of the fountain of youth, they may help us maintaining the quality of life in the old age. © 2010 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
Detecting Malware with Information Complexity

Malware concealment is the predominant strategy for malware propagation. Black hats create variants of malware based on polymorphism and metamorphism. Malware variants, by definition, share some information. Although the concealment strategy alters this information, there are still patterns on the software. Given a zoo of labelled malware and benign-ware, we ask whether a suspect program is more similar to our malware or to our benign-ware. Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) is a generic metric that measures the shared information content of two strings. This measure opens a new front in the malware arms race, one where the countermeasures promise to be more costly for malware writers, who must now obfuscate patterns as strings qua strings, without reference to execution, in their variants. Our approach classifies disk-resident malware with 97.4% accuracy and a false positive rate of 3%. We demonstrate that its accuracy can be improved by combining NCD with the compressibility rates of executables using decision forests, paving the way for future improvements. We demonstrate that malware reported within a narrow time frame of a few days is more homogeneous than malware reported over two years, but that our method still classifies the latter with 95.2% accuracy and a 5% false positive rate. Due to its use of compression, the time and computation cost of our method is nontrivial. We show that simple approximation techniques can improve its running time by up to 63%. We compare our results to the results of applying the 59 anti-malware programs used on the VirusTotal website to our malware. Our approach outperforms each one used alone and matches that of all of them used collectively.
Close stellar encounters with planetesimal discs: the dynamics of asymmetry in the β Pictoris system

We numerically investigate the dynamics of how a close stellar fly-by encounter of a symmetrical circumstellar planetesimal disc can give rise to the many kinds of asymmetries and substructures attributed to the edge-on dusty disc of β Pictoris. In addition we present new optical coronagraphic observations of the outer parts of the disc of β Pic, and report that the radial extent is significantly greater than was found in previous measurements. The north-easterly extension of the disc's mid-plane is now measured out to 1835 au from the star; the south-westerly component is measured out to 1450 au. Thus the asymmetry in the length of the former with respect to the latter is approximately 25 per cent. We proceed to use the length asymmetry induced in the distribution of simulation test particles as the principal diagnostic feature when modelling the disc response in order to constrain fly-by parameters. In particular we favour a low-inclination prograde and near-parabolic orbit perturber of mass approximately 0.5 M⊙. These initial conditions suggest that the perturber could have been physically associated with β Pic prior to the encounter. Thus we also consider the possibility that the perturber could be bound to β Pic, a consideration also of general interest where dust discs are known to exist in binary star systems. We show that a further consequence of a low-velocity encounter is that the perturber could have captured planetesimals from the β Pic disc, and we deduce that as a result of this the perturber could display a dust disc that is presently amenable to observation. In some of our models, we can relate groupings of perturbed particles to the large-scale structure of the β Pic disc. The groupings correspond to high-eccentricity and high-inclination particles that reach apocentre and maximum height in the south-west, moderately eccentric and low-inclination particles that reach apocentre in the north-east, and relatively unperturbed particles inside ∼200 au radius.
Genomic Instability and Colon Carcinogenesis: From the Perspective of Genes

Colon cancer is the second most lethal cancer; approximately 600,000 people die of it annually in the world. Colon carcinogenesis generally follows a slow and stepwise process of accumulation of mutations under the influence of environmental and epigenetic factors. To adopt a personalized (tailored) cancer therapy approach and to improve current strategies for prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy overall, advanced understanding of molecular events associated with colon carcinogenesis is necessary. A contemporary approach that combines genetics, epigenomics, and signaling pathways has revealed many genetic/genomic alterations associated with colon cancer progression and their relationships to a genomic instability phenotype prevalent in colon cancer. In this review, we describe the relationship between gene mutations associated with colon carcinogenesis and a genomic instability phenotype, and we discuss possible clinical applications of genomic instability studies. Colon carcinogenesis is associated with frequent mutations in several pathways that include phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, adenomatous polyposis coli, p53 (TP53), F-box and WD repeat domain containing 7, transforming growth factor-β, chromosome cohesion, and K-RAS. These genes frequently mutated in pathways affecting colon cancer were designated colon cancer (CAN) genes. Aberrations in major colon CAN genes have a causal relationship to genomic instability. Conversely, genomic instability itself plays a role in colon carcinogenesis in experimental settings, as demonstrated in transgenic mouse models with high genomic instability. Thus, there is a feedback-type relationship between CAN gene mutations and genomic instability. These genetic/genomic studies have led to emerging efforts to apply the knowledge to colon cancer prognosis and to targeted therapy.
Analysis of Harmonics of Electric Traction System using Wavelet Transform

Wavelet Transform is a mathematical tool for time frequency analysis of non stationary signals like the current waveform in electric traction system. The locomotives used in traction system have different types of traction motors -dc and three phase ac motors with different methods of speed control. Hence technologies will be different depending on the type of locomotives. The nature of the load in electric traction system is very dynamic due to the acceleration, constant speed operation and deceleration of the locomotives. Due to the variation in the type and running pattern of locomotives harmonics induced into the system varies with time. In this paper, wavelet transform is applied to find out the total harmonic distortion of the measured current from a traction substation. Also a comparison is made by applying discrete Fourier transform to the instantaneous values of measured current. Keywordstraction, locomotive, harmonics, wavelet transform.
Glycoprotein Biosynthesis in a Eukaryote Lacking the Membrane Protein Rft1*

Background: The membrane protein Rft1 was proposed to flip Man5GlcNAc2-PP-dolichol (M5-DLO) to the ER lumen for N-glycoprotein biosynthesis. Results: Rft1-null Trypanosoma brucei has a normal steady-state level of mature dolichol-linked oligosaccharide (mDLO) and significant N-glycosylation. Conclusion: Rft1 is not required for M5-DLO flipping in vivo but aids conversion of M5-DLO to mDLO by another mechanism. Significance: The M5-DLO flippase remains to be identified. Mature dolichol-linked oligosaccharides (mDLOs) needed for eukaryotic protein N-glycosylation are synthesized by a multistep pathway in which the biosynthetic lipid intermediate Man5GlcNAc2-PP-dolichol (M5-DLO) flips from the cytoplasmic to the luminal face of the endoplasmic reticulum. The endoplasmic reticulum membrane protein Rft1 is intimately involved in mDLO biosynthesis. Yeast genetic analyses implicated Rft1 as the M5-DLO flippase, but because biochemical tests challenged this assignment, the function of Rft1 remains obscure. To understand the role of Rft1, we sought to analyze mDLO biosynthesis in vivo in the complete absence of the protein. Rft1 is essential for yeast viability, and no Rft1-null organisms are currently available. Here, we exploited Trypanosoma brucei (Tb), an early diverging eukaryote whose Rft1 homologue functions in yeast. We report that TbRft1-null procyclic trypanosomes grow nearly normally. They have normal steady-state levels of mDLO and significant N-glycosylation, indicating robust M5-DLO flippase activity. Remarkably, the mutant cells have 30–100-fold greater steady-state levels of M5-DLO than wild-type cells. All N-glycans in the TbRft1-null cells originate from mDLO indicating that the M5-DLO excess is not available for glycosylation. These results suggest that rather than facilitating M5-DLO flipping, Rft1 facilitates conversion of M5-DLO to mDLO by another mechanism, possibly by acting as an M5-DLO chaperone.
Optimal detection in training assisted SIMO systems with phase noise impairments

In this paper, the problem of optimal maximum likelihood detection in a single user single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channel with phase noise at the receiver is considered. The optimal detection rules under training are derived for two operation modes, namely when the phase increments are fully correlated among the M receiver antennas (synchronous operation) and when they are independent (non-synchronous operation). The phase noise increments are parameterized by a very general distribution, which includes the Wiener phase noise model as a special case. It is proven that phase noise creates a symbol-error-rate (SER) floor for both operation modes. In the synchronous operation this error floor is independent of M, while it goes to zero exponentially with M in the non-synchronous operation.
Effect of type and amount of dietary fat and 1,2-dimethylhydrazine on biliary bile acids, fecal bile acids, and neutral sterols in rats.

The effect of type (corn oil or lard) and quantity (5 or 20%) of dietary fat and 1,2-dimethylhydrazine (DMH) on the composition of biliary bile acids, fecal bile acids, and neutral sterols was studied in rats exposed to a given regimen for two generations prior to s.c. treatment with DMH for 20 weeks. Biliary excretion of total bile acids as well as cholic acid, beta-muricholic acid, ursodeoxycholic acid, and deoxycholic acid was higher in rats fed a diet containing 20% corn oil or lard than it was in rats fed diets containing 5% corn oil or lard. Treatment of animals with DMH produced an increase in biliary total bile acids, cholic acid, hyodeoxycholic acid, and deoxycholic acid irrespective of diets. High-fat (corn oil or lard at 20% level) intake was associated with an increased excretion of fecal neutral sterols and bile acids. The excretion of deoxycholic acid, lithocholic acid, and 12-ketolithocholic acid was increased in rats fed high-fat diets. The source of fat had no major influence on the excretory pattern of cholesterol metabolites and bile acids. DMH-treated animals excreted higher levels of fecal coprostanol, coprostanone, deoxycholic acid, lithocholic acid, and 12-ketolithocholic acid than did controls.