Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DNA binding to crystalline silica characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy.

The interaction of DNA with crystalline silica in buffered aqueous solutions at physiologic pH has been investigated by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). In aqueous buffer, significant changes occur in the spectra of DNA and silica upon coincubation, suggesting that a DNA-silica complex forms as silica interacts with DNA. As compared to the spectrum of silica alone, the changes in the FT-IR spectrum of silica in the DNA-silica complex are consistent with an Si-O bond perturbation on the surface of the silica crystal. DNA remains in a B-form conformation in the DNA-silica complex. The most prominent changes in the DNA spectrum occur in the 1225 to 1000 cm-1 region. Upon binding, the PO2- asymmetric stretch at 1225 cm-1 is increased in intensity and slightly shifted to lower frequencies; the PO2- symmetric stretch at 1086 cm-1 is markedly increased in intensity and the band at 1053 cm-1, representing either the phosphodiester or the C-O stretch of DNA backbone, is significantly reduced in intensity. In D2O buffer, the DNA spectrum reveals a marked increase in intensity of the peak at 1086 cm-1 and a progressive decrease in intensity of the peak at 1053 cm-1 when DNA is exposed to increasing concentrations of silica. The carbonyl band at 1688 cm-1 diminishes and shifts to slightly lower frequencies with increasing concentrations of silica. The present study demonstrates that crystalline silica binds to the phosphate-sugar backbone of DNA. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Learning-based object abstraction method from simple instructions for human support robot HSR

This study proposes the development of a simple remote-controlled daily assistive robot to assist physically challenged individuals. Specifically, we present a method for target object selection using a single click on a graphical user interface. Using this information, the robot can automatically estimate the unknown target object region to plan to grasp and fetch the object. The challenging task is to correctly estimate the region of the object of interest. The proposed system is implemented using the following framework for estimating the region of the object. First, the robot automatically estimates the object region based on user input. Second, the user can intervene by interactively drawing and erasing the estimated region while the system sequentially updates the estimation method based only on the user's correction. The advantage of this system is that only limited inputs are required from the user, a feature that is useful for handicapped users. Moreover, we introduce (1) graph cuts, comprising “HyperPixels” and three-dimensional information, to enable the system to recognize the rich features around the user-specified region for robust segmentation, (2) interactive correction of the automatically estimated object region while the system calculates good graph parameters for the correct estimation, and (3) recall and use of the learned parameters for the estimation based on the database of features around the clicked point.
Volumetric Changes in Cranial Vault Expansion: Comparison of Fronto-Orbital Advancement and Posterior Cranial Vault Distraction Osteogenesis

Background: Posterior cranial vault distraction osteogenesis has recently been introduced to treat patients with multisuture syndromic craniosynostosis and is believed to provide greater gains in intracranial volume. This study provides volumetric analysis to determine the gains in intracranial volume produced by this modality. Methods: This was a two-center retrospective study of preprocedure and postprocedure computed tomography scans of two groups of 15 patients each with syndromic multisuture craniosynostosis treated with either fronto-orbital advancement or posterior cranial vault distraction osteogenesis. Scan data were analyzed volumetrically with Mimics software. Volumetric gains attributable to growth between scans were controlled for. Results: The mean advancements were 12.5 mm for fronto-orbital advancement and 24.8 mm for distraction osteogenesis. The mean difference in volume between the preoperative and postoperative scans was 144 cm3 for fronto-orbital advancement and 274 cm3 for (p = 0.009). After controlling for growth, the corrected mean volume difference was 66 cm3 for fronto-orbital advancement and 142 cm3 for distraction osteogenesis (p = 0.0017). The corrected mean volume difference per millimeter of advancement was 4.6 cm3 for fronto-orbital advancement and 5.8 cm3 for distraction (p = 0.357). Conclusions: In this retrospective study, posterior cranial vault distraction osteogenesis provided statistically greater intracranial volume expansion than fronto-orbital advancement. The volume gains per millimeter advancement were similar between groups, with a trend toward greater gains per millimeter with distraction osteogenesis. Gradual expansion of the overlying soft tissues with posterior cranial vault distraction osteogenesis appears to be the primary mechanism for greater volume gains with this technique. CLINICAL QUESTION/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic, III.
7‐T MR—from research to clinical applications?

Over 20 000 MR systems are currently installed worldwide and, although the majority operate at magnetic fields of 1.5 T and below (i.e. about 70%), experience with 3‐T (in high‐field clinical diagnostic imaging and research) and 7‐T (research only) human MR scanners points to a future in functional and metabolic MR diagnostics. Complementary to previous studies, this review attempts to provide an overview of ultrahigh‐field MR research with special emphasis on emerging clinical applications at 7 T. We provide a short summary of the technical development and the current status of installed MR systems. The advantages and challenges of ultrahigh‐field MRI and MRS are discussed with special emphasis on radiofrequency inhomogeneity, relaxation times, signal‐to‐noise improvements, susceptibility effects, chemical shifts, specific absorption rate and other safety issues. In terms of applications, we focus on the topics most likely to gain significantly from 7‐T MR, i.e. brain imaging and spectroscopy and musculoskeletal imaging, but also body imaging, which is particularly challenging. Examples are given to demonstrate the advantages of susceptibility‐weighted imaging, time‐of‐flight MR angiography, high‐resolution functional MRI, 1H and 31P MRSI in the human brain, sodium and functional imaging of cartilage and the first results (and artefacts) using an eight‐channel body array, suggesting future areas of research that should be intensified in order to fully explore the potential of 7‐T MR systems for use in clinical diagnosis. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Factors influencing boater satisfaction in Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

This article investigates determinants of satisfaction for recreational fishers and nonfishers boating in Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Trip satisfaction was modeled as a function of subjective evaluations of various trip aspects. Satisfaction of fishers and nonfishers was related to evaluations of environment quality and weather quality. Satisfaction of fishers was also related to evaluations of fishing quality. There was no effect of evaluation of marine life quality, facilities quality, number of people encountered, number of vessels encountered, or number of wildlife encounters on satisfaction for either group. Results are consistent with the multiple-satisfactions concept of recreation satisfaction, and provide insights into the types of experiences sought by fishers and nonfishers in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
From Enterprise Architecture to Business Ecosystem Architecture: Stages and Challenges for Extending Architectures beyond Organizational Boundaries

Today, Enterprises act in an increasingly interconnected world and in different kinds of collaborative networks. They are part of business ecosystems in which they interact with their customers, partners and competitors. The processes of analyzing and planning the intertwinement of business and IT architecture within enterprises has been successfully supported by enterprise architecture management (EAM) approaches. In this paper, we analyze four cases from different industries (health care, logistics, retail, and education) and argue that the intra-organizational concepts of enterprise architectures (EA) and EAM need to be extended to grasp the challenges of the enterprises' interconnectedness. Beyond the known concepts of extended enterprise architecture and federated architectures, we define five stages of extended architectures. Additionally, we describe challenges and existing solutions, which are relevant for this extended perspective.
Inhibitory Effect of Duabanga grandiflora on MRSA Biofilm Formation via Prevention of Cell-Surface Attachment and PBP2a Production

Formation of biofilms is a major factor for nosocomial infections associated with methicillin-resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This study was carried out to determine the ability of a fraction, F-10, derived from the plant Duabanga grandiflora to inhibit MRSA biofilm formation. Inhibition of biofilm production and microtiter attachment assays were employed to study the anti-biofilm activity of F-10, while latex agglutination test was performed to study the influence of F-10 on penicillin-binding protein 2a (PBP2a) level in MRSA biofilm. PBP2a is a protein that confers resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics. The results showed that, F-10 at minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC, 0.75 mg/mL) inhibited biofilm production by 66.10%; inhibited cell-surface attachment by more than 95%; and a reduced PBP2a level in the MRSA biofilm was observed. Although ampicilin was more effective in inhibiting biofilm production (MIC of 0.05 mg/mL, 84.49%) compared to F-10, the antibiotic was less effective in preventing cell-surface attachment. A higher level of PBP2a was detected in ampicillin-treated MRSA showing the development of further resistance in these colonies. This study has shown that F-10 possesses anti-biofilm activity, which can be attributed to its ability to reduce cell-surface attachment and attenuate the level of PBP2a that we postulated to play a crucial role in mediating biofilm formation.
Segmental modeling using a continuous mixture of nonparametric models

A major limitation of hidden Markov model (HMM) based automatic speech recognition is the inherent assumption that successive observations within a state are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). The i.i. d. assumption is reasonable for some of the states (e.g., a state that corresponds to a steady state vowel). However, most states clearly violate this assumption (e.g., states corresponding to vowel-consonant transition, diphthongs, etc.) and are in fact characterized by a highly correlated and nonstationary speech signal. Previous alternative models have been proposed, that attempt to describe the dynamics of the signal within a phonetic unit. The new approach is generally known by the name segmental modeling, since the speech signal is modeled on a segment level base and not on a frame base (such as HMM). We propose a family of new segmental models that are composed of two elements. The first element is a nonparametric representation of the mean and variance trajectories, and the second is some parameterized transformation (e.g., random shift) of the trajectory that is global to the entire segment. The new model is in fact a continuous mixture of segment trajectories. We present recognition results on a large vocabulary task, and compare the model to alternative segment models on a triphone recognition task.
Organization and Regulation of Soybean SUMOylation System under Abiotic Stress Conditions

Covalent attachment of the small ubiquitin-related modifier, SUMO, to substrate proteins plays a significant role in plants under stress conditions, which can alter target proteins' function, location, and protein-protein interactions. Despite this importance, information about SUMOylation in the major legume crop, soybean, remains obscure. In this study, we performed a bioinformatics analysis of the entire soybean genome and identified 40 genes belonged to six families involved in a cascade of enzymatic reactions in soybean SUMOylation system. The cis-acting elements analysis revealed that promoters of SUMO pathway genes contained different combinations of stress and development-related cis-regulatory elements. RNA-seq data analysis showed that SUMO pathway components exhibited versatile tissue-specific expression patterns, indicating coordinated functioning during plant growth and development. qRT-PCR analysis of 13 SUMO pathway members indicated that majority of the SUMO pathway members were transcriptionally up-regulated by NaCl, heat and ABA stimuli during the 24 h period of treatment. Furthermore, SUMOylation dynamics in soybean roots under abiotic stress treatment were analyzed by western blot, which were characterized by regulation of SUMOylated proteins. Collectively, this study defined the organization of the soybean SUMOylation system and implied an essential function for SUMOylation in soybean abiotic stress responses.
Coupled objective function to study the role of abdominal muscle forces in lifting using the kinematics-driven model

To circumvent the existing shortcoming of optimisation algorithms in trunk biomechanical models, both agonist and antagonist trunk muscle stresses to different powers are introduced in a novel objective function to evaluate the role of abdominal muscles in trunk stability and spine compression. This coupled objective function is introduced in our kinematics-driven finite element model to estimate muscle forces and to identify the role of abdominal muscles in upright standing while lifting symmetrically a weight at different heights. Predictive equations for the compression and buckling forces are developed. Results are also compared with the conventional objective function that neglects abdominal muscle forces. An overall optimal solution involving smaller spinal compression but higher trunk stability is automatically attained when choosing muscle stress powers at and around 3. Results highlight the internal oblique muscle as the most efficient abdominal muscle during the tasks investigated. The estimated relative forces in abdominal muscles are found to be in good agreement with the respective ratios of recorded electromyography activities.
Empirical evaluation of ad hoc teamwork in the pursuit domain

The concept of creating autonomous agents capable of exhibiting ad hoc teamwork was recently introduced as a challenge to the AI, and specifically to the multiagent systems community. An agent capable of ad hoc teamwork is one that can effectively cooperate with multiple potential teammates on a set of collaborative tasks. Previous research has investigated theoretically optimal ad hoc teamwork strategies in restrictive settings. This paper presents the first empirical study of ad hoc teamwork in a more open, complex teamwork domain. Specifically, we evaluate a range of effective algorithms for on-line behavior generation on the part of a single ad hoc team agent that must collaborate with a range of possible teammates in the pursuit domain.
On the Common Substring Alignment Problem

The Common Substring Alignment Problem is defined as follows: Given a set of one or more strings S1,S2? Sc and a target string T, Y is a common substring of all strings Si, that is, Si=BiYFi. The goal is to compute the similarity of all strings Si with T, without computing the part of Y again and again. Using the classical dynamic programming tables, each appearance of Y in a source string would require the computation of all the values in a dynamic programming table of size O(n? ) where ? is the size of Y. Here we describe an algorithm which is composed of an encoding stage and an alignment stage. During the first stage, a data structure is constructed which encodes the comparison of Y with T. Then, during the alignment stage, for each comparison of a source Si with T, the pre-compiled data structure is used to speed up the part of Y. We show how to reduce the O(n? ) alignment work, for each appearance of the common substring Y in a source string, to O(n)-at the cost of O(n? ) encoding work, which is executed only once.
Linking placental ischemia and hypertension in preeclampsia: role of endothelin 1.

One of the most pervasive disorders of pregnancy is preeclampsia, which is defined as new-onset hypertension presenting after the 20th week of gestation and is accompanied by increasing levels of proteinuria and often edema.1 The overall prevalence of preeclampsia is ≈8% with higher incidence in specific ethnic subpopulations, notably blacks.2,3 The disorder is predominantly a complication of primiparous women, who have a 3-fold higher incidence rate than multiparous women. There are a number of known factors that convey elevated risk of developing preeclampsia, notably elevated body mass index, and a previous incidence of preeclampsia, because women who experienced preeclampsia in previous pregnancies are 7 times more likely to exhibit preeclamptic symptoms in subsequent pregnancies than those with no history of preeclampsia.4 It has also been shown that high body mass index can double the risk of preeclampsia, and the scale of obesity correlates directly with the increase risk of developing the disorder.5 Although the link between these risk factors seem logical, there are also a number of other risk factors (maternal age, induced abortions, interpregnancy interval, and socioeconomic factors) for which the links to preeclampsia are not as clear.6 More research is warranted into the mechanistic effect of these factors in the etiology of preeclampsia. There are currently no definitive treatment options for the resolution of preeclampsia. Available interventions are confined to magnesium sulfate for the prophylaxis of seizures and the administration of one of various antihypertensive agents, although normalization of blood pressure is not normally possible, and the disease continues to progress.1 Indeed, the only effective resolution of preeclampsia is delivery of the placenta, because delivery of the fetus alone is not sufficient.7,8 It is this fact that suggested the pathological origins of the development of preeclampsia. Although …
Better Parser Combination

A better parser combination approach is proposed in this paper to combine the n-best outputs of individual parsers for higher performance. Under the constituent weighting and reparsing framework, we propose a constrained constituent recombination method to address the ”flat tree” problem of traditional constituent recombination. The better combination parser generated four runs ranked the top No.1 to No.4 in the CIPS ParsEval-2009.
Storage device performance prediction with CART models

Storage device performance prediction is a key element of self-managed storage systems. The paper explores the application of a machine learning tool, CART (classification and regression trees) models, to storage device modeling. Our approach predicts a device's performance as a function of input workloads, requiring no knowledge of the device internals. We propose two uses of CART models: one that predicts per-request response times (and then derives aggregate values); one that predicts aggregate values directly from workload characteristics. After being trained on the device in question, both provide accurate black-box models across a range of test traces from real environments. Experiments show that these models predict the average and 90th percentile response time with a relative error as low as 19%, when the training workloads are similar to the testing workloads, and interpolate well across different workloads.
The Value of Autofluorescence Bronchoscopy Combined with White Light Bronchoscopy Compared with White Light Alone in the Diagnosis of Intraepithelial Neoplasia and Invasive Lung Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Objective: To compare the accuracy of autofluorescence bronchoscopy (AFB) combined with white light bronchoscopy (WLB) versus WLB alone in the diagnosis of lung cancer. Methods: The Ovid, PubMed, and Google Scholar databases from January 1990 to October 2010 were searched. Two reviewers independently assessed the quality of the trials and extracted data. The relative risk for sensitivity and specificity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone to detect intraepithelial neoplasia and invasive cancer were pooled by Review Manager. Results: Twenty-one studies involving 3266 patients were ultimately analyzed. The pool relative sensitivity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone to detect intraepithelial neoplasia and invasive cancer was 2.04 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.72–2.42) and 1.15 (95% CI 1.05–1.26), respectively. The pool relative specificity on a per-lesion basis of AFB + WLB versus WLB alone was 0.65 (95% CI 0.59–0.73). Conclusions: Although the specificity of AFB + WLB is lower than WLB alone, AFB + WLB seems to significantly improve the sensitivity to detect intraepithelial neoplasia. However, this advantage over WLB alone seems much less in detecting invasive lung cancer.
Image-space construction of displaced normal maps

We present a hybrid 2D/3D algorithm for effeciently deriving a normal map of displacement-mapped polygonal geometry. Unlike the traditional bump-mapping approach by [Blinn 1978], ours is based on a physical representation of the true displaced mesh. It is therefore more accurate and less restrictive, easily handling a variety of procedural displacements. What makes our approach unique is that it does not entail finely tessellating the polygonal mesh or dicing it into REYES micropolygons.
Accelerated Fault Simulation and Fault Grading in Combinational Circuits

The principles of fault simulation and fault grading are introduced by a general description of the problem. Based upon the well-known concept of restricting fault simulation to the fanout stems and of combining it with a backward traversal inside the fanout-free regions of the circuit, proposals are presented to further accelerate fault simulation and fault grading. These proposals aim at parallel processing of patterns at all stages of the calculation procedure, at reducing the number of fanout stems for which a fault simulation has to be carried out, and at taking advantage of structural characteristics of the circuit. An experiment with a set of benchmark circuits demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approaches.
Attention-based dynamic visual search using inner-scene similarity: algorithms and bounds

A visual search is required when applying a recognition process on a scene containing multiple objects. In such cases, we would like to avoid an exhaustive sequential search. This work proposes a dynamic visual search framework based mainly on inner-scene similarity. Given a number of candidates (e.g., subimages), we hypothesize is that more visually similar candidates are more likely to have the same identity. We use this assumption for determining the order of attention. Both deterministic and stochastic approaches, relying on this hypothesis, are considered. Under the deterministic approach, we suggest a measure similar to Kolmogorov's epsilon-covering that quantifies the difficulty of a search task. We show that this measure bounds the performance of all search algorithms and suggest a simple algorithm that meets this bound. Under the stochastic approach, we model the identity of the candidates as a set of correlated random variables and derive a search procedure based on linear estimation. Several experiments are presented in which the statistical characteristics, search algorithm, and bound are evaluated and verified.