Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Life Cycle Analysis of Road Construction and Use

Both the construction and use of roads have a range of environmental impacts; therefore, it is important to assess the sources of their burdens to adopt correct mitigation policies. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a useful method to obtain demonstrable, accurate and non-misleading information for decision-making experts. The study presents a “cradle to gate with options” LCA of a provincial road during 60 year-service life. Input data derive from the bill of quantity of the project and their impacts have been evaluated according to the European standard EN 15804. The study considers the impacts of the construction and maintenance stages, lighting, and use of the vehicles on the built road. The results obtained from a SimaPro model highlight that the almost half of impacts took place during the construction stage rather than the use stage. Therefore, the adoption of environmentally friendly road planning procedures, the use of low-impact procedures in the production of materials, and the use of secondary raw materials could have the largest potential for reducing environmental impacts.
Poly-N-Acetylglucosamine Production in Staphylococcus aureus Is Essential for Virulence in Murine Models of Systemic Infection

ABSTRACT The contribution of the Staphylococcus aureus surface polysaccharide poly-N-acetylglucosamine (PNAG) to virulence was evaluated in three mouse models of systemic infection: bacteremia, renal abscess formation, and lethality following high-dose intraperitoneal (i.p.) infection. Deletion of the intercellular adhesin (ica) locus that encodes the biosynthetic enzymes for PNAG production in S. aureus strains Mn8, Newman, and NCTC 10833 resulted in mutant strains with significantly reduced abilities to maintain bacterial levels in blood following intravenous or i.p. injection, to spread systemically to the kidneys following i.p. injection, or to induce a moribund/lethal state following i.p. infection. In the bacteremia model, neither growth phase nor growth medium used to prepare the S. aureus inoculum affected the conclusion that PNAG production was needed for full virulence. As the SarA regulatory protein has been shown to affect ica transcription, PNAG synthesis, and biofilm formation, we also evaluated S. aureus strains Mn8 and 10833 deleted for the sarA gene in the renal infection model. A decrease in PNAG production was seen in sarA mutants using immunoblots of cell surface extracts but was insufficient to reduce the virulence of sarA-deleted strains in this model. S. aureus strains deleted for the ica genes were much more susceptible to antibody-independent opsonic killing involving human peripheral blood leukocytes and rabbit complement. Thus, PNAG confers on S. aureus resistance to killing mediated by these innate host immune mediators. Overall, PNAG production by S. aureus appears to be a critical virulence factor as assessed in murine models of systemic infection.
Neutral-Lipid Analysis Reveals Elevation of Acylglycerols and Lack of Cholesterol Esters in Plasmodium falciparum-Infected Erythrocytes

ABSTRACT Here we show that blood-stage Plasmodium falciparum organisms accumulate a high mass of triacylglycerol and diacylglycerol. However, we failed to detect cholesterol esters, a second neutral lipid species reported to be important for a related apicomplexan, Toxoplasma gondii. Evidence for P. falciparum and T. gondii homologues of acyl coenzyme A:diacylglycerol acyltransferase suggests that acylglycerols may be the conserved neutral lipids in apicomplexans.
KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL? KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER AND SOCIAL NORMS IN GOURMET CUISINE

In this paper, we explore the conditions for knowhow transfer in gourmet cuisine, an industry characterized by rapid innovation and weak protection of intellectual property (IP). We investigate whether bilateral exchanges are facilitated either by the existence of norms that reduce the risk of misappropriation or by IP strategies that decrease the potential for loss. Moreover, we disentangle how these different mechanisms interact. Using evidence from a scenario-based field experiment, we demonstrate that norms play a role in governing the use of transferred information, but that IP strategies also play an important role. We show that norms substitute for some types of IP strategies but complement others.
Effectiveness of group metacognitive therapy in self-efficacy and defense styles in women with multiple sclerosis

Introduction: This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group metacognitive therapy in self-efficacy and defense styles in women with multiple sclerosis (MS). Materials and Methods: In this clinical trial (code: IRCT2015091624054N1), from among all the patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, who were referred to the MS Society in Khorasan Razavi in 2014, 30 women were selected through available sampling method and were randomly assigned to two groups: an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received metacognitive therapy for eight weeks while the control group spent the routine process of the sessions held by the MS Society. For data collection, Sherer General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) and Defense Styles Questionnaire (DSQ) were administered in the pretest, posttest and follow-up test. Repeated-measures ANOVA with a significance level α of 0.05 were conducted for data analysis. Results: The results showed that group metacognitive therapy led to a significantly higher level of self-efficacy (P<0.001) and use of mature defense mechanisms (P<0.001) compared to control group. The results maintained over one-month and three-month followups. Conclusion: It seems that group metacognitive therapy can improve self-efficacy and increase the use of mature defense mechanisms in women with multiple sclerosis.
Memory Controller Metadata Cache : Compressibility & Location Info CoreLLC Compression-Decompression Engine DRAM Metadata Processor

Transparent Memory-Compression (TMC) allows the system to obtain the bandwidth benefits of memory compression in an OS-transparent manner. Unfortunately, prior designs for TMC (MemZip) rely on using non-commodity memory modules, which can limit their adoption. We show that TMC can be implemented with commodity memories by storing multiple compressed lines in a single memory location and retrieving all these lines in a single memory access, thereby increasing the effective memory bandwidth. TMC requires metadata to specify the compressibility and location of the line. Unfortunately, even with dedicated metadata caches, maintaining and accessing this metadata incurs significant bandwidth overheads and causes slowdown. Our goal is to enable TMC for commodity memories by eliminating the bandwidth overheads of metadata accesses. This paper proposes PTMC (Practical and Transparent MemoryCompression), a simple design for obtaining bandwidth benefits of memory compression while relying only on commodity (nonECC) memory modules and avoiding any OS support. Our design uses a novel inline-metadata mechanism, whereby the compressibility of the line can be determined by scanning the line for a special marker word, eliminating the overheads of metadata access. We also develop a low-cost Line Location Predictor (LLP) that can determine the location of the line with 98% accuracy and a dynamic solution that disables compression if the benefits of compression are smaller than the overheads. Our evaluations show that PTMC provides a speedup of up to 73%, is robust (no slowdown for any workload), and can be implemented with a total storage overhead of less than 300 bytes.
Low docosahexaenoic acid levels in rod outer segment membranes of mice with rds/peripherin and P216L peripherin mutations.

PURPOSE Humans with retinitis pigmentosa and dogs with progressive rod-cone degeneration (prcd) have lower than normal blood levels of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, including docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), the major fatty acid found in retinal rod outer segments (ROS). In addition, prcd-affected dogs have lower levels of DHA in their ROS than control animals. The present study was designed to determine whether mice that are heterozygous for the rds mutation and transgenic mice heterozygous for a specific rds/peripherin mutation (P216L) have lower DHA levels in their ROS and other tissues than do control mice. METHODS Wild-type (rds(+/+)) mice, mice with the rds(-/-) (null) and rds(+/-) mutations, and mice with the P216L rds/peripherin mutation on the rds(+/-) background were maintained in the vivarium under identical husbandry conditions, and tissues were removed from each group for analysis at approximately 2 months of age. Fatty acid compositions of total lipids from plasma, red blood cells, liver, and ROS were determined by gas-liquid chromatography. ROS purity from each group was determined by SDS-PAGE with silver staining. The morphologic status of retinas representing each genotype was analyzed by light and electron microscopy. RESULTS There was no difference between rds(+/-), P216L on rds(+/-), and rds(+/+) (control) animals in the fatty acid composition of plasma, expressed as relative mole percent or as nanomoles fatty acid per milliliter of plasma. Small but statistically significant differences were found in 18:0 and C-22 polyunsaturated fatty acids of red blood cells. In the liver, the control animals had higher levels of 20:4n-6. In contrast, the ROS of control animals had levels of DHA that were 1.4 times that of ROS from either rds(+/-) or P216L on rds(+/-) mice of the same age. The reduction in DHA was not accompanied by an increase in 22:5n-6, which always occurs in neural tissues of animals deprived of n-3 fatty acids. SDS-PAGE of the three ROS membrane preparations showed that they were of identical purity. CONCLUSIONS Mice heterozygous for the spontaneous rds/peripherin mutation or mice carrying the P216L mutation on this heterozygous background have a statistically significant reduction of DHA in their ROS membranes. The authors propose that reduction in DHA is an adaptive response to metabolic stress caused by the mutation.
Towards a Goal-oriented Approach to Adaptable Re-deployment of Cloud-based Applications

Due to the on-demand and dynamic nature of Cloud, there is an increasing interest for automated management of adaptation and (possibly) re-deployment of cloud applications to realize quality requirements and evolution needs autonomously at run-time. This paper proposes a fast and automated approach for adapting and redeploying a cloud application at run-time as dictated by evolution needs and sudden changes in the operating environment conditions. The proposed approach exploits a graph-based model and an algorithm that extracts a sub-graph identifying the adaptation processes to be executed according to evolution changes. The approach is general enough to be implemented by any cloud application management framework. A TOSCA-based description of the structure and management aspects of the cloud application may be updated according to the above mentioned sub-graph. Then, this description may be processed by a TOSCA-compliant runtime environment to effectively adapt and possibly re-deploy the cloud application in an automated manner. The paper also illustrates the instantiation of this generic approach for adapting an e-commerce cloud application.
Durable Top-k Queries on Temporal Data ( Technical Report Version )

Many datasets have a temporal dimension and contain a wealth of historical information. When using such data to make decisions, we often want to examine not only the current snapshot of the data but also its history. For example, given a result object of a snapshot query, we can ask for its “durability,” or intuitively, how long (or how often) it was valid in the past. This paper considers durable top-k queries, which look for objects whose values were among the top k for at least some fraction of the times during a given interval—e.g., stocks that were among the top 20 most heavily traded for at least 80% of the trading days during the last quarter of 2017. We present a comprehensive suite of techniques for solving this problem, ranging from exact algorithms where k is fixed in advance, to approximate methods that work for any k and are able to exploit workload and data characteristics to improve accuracy while capping index cost. We show that our methods vastly outperform baseline and previous methods using both real and synthetic datasets. PVLDB Reference Format: Junyang Gao, Pankaj K. Agarwal, Jun Yang. Durable Top-k Queries on Temporal Data. PVLDB, 11 (13): xxxx-yyyy, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14778/3275366.3275371
Productivity in Brazil in the Period 1996-2016: The Technology Impact for Economic Growth

Empirical studies regarding the productivity in developing countries, including Brazil, have demonstrated the negative impact of high inflation rates on the economic performance. However, the recent Brazilian experience clearly shows that stabilization, in and of itself, is not capable of recovering the investment rates. With this in mind, this study s goal is to answer, with the help of econometric simulation models, the questions: (i) what are the key-drivers to assess the Brazilian economy and (ii) what are the key-factors to be considered when investments are made, particulary in technology to impact the productivity growth To answer the questions we evaluated the impacts of macro-economic variables on private investments, using a strategic bias and a long term vision plan. The estimates demonstrate empirical crowding-in evidence of public investments over private investments as a real impact to productivity, considering technology as a key driver for growth. As for public invetsments we suggest that the crowding-in impact dislocates private investments. All these indicators were obtained as presented in the therory, with the exception of the real interest rates variable (r), in which we observed that the coefficient is positive and insignificant in the estimated equation.
The cortical connectivity of the periaqueductal gray and the conditioned response to the threat of breathlessness

Previously we observed differential activation in individual columns of the periaqueductal grey (PAG) during breathlessness and its conditioned anticipation (Faull et al., 2016b). Here, we have extended this work by determining how the individual columns of the PAG interact with higher cortical centres, both at rest and in the context of breathlessness threat. Activation was observed in ventrolateral PAG (vlPAG) and lateral PAG (lPAG), where activity scaled with breathlessness intensity ratings, revealing a potential interface between sensation and cognition during breathlessness. At rest the lPAG was functionally correlated with cortical sensorimotor areas, conducive to facilitating fight/flight responses, and demonstrated increased synchronicity with the amygdala during breathlessness. The vlPAG showed fronto-limbic correlations at rest, whereas during breathlessness anticipation, reduced functional synchronicity was seen to both lPAG and motor structures, conducive to freezing behaviours. These results move us towards understanding how the PAG might be intricately involved in human responses to threat. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.21749. 001
Reliable gains? Evidence for substantially underpowered designs in studies of working memory training transfer to fluid intelligence

In recent years, cognitive scientists and commercial interests (e.g., Fit Brains, Lumosity) have focused research attention and financial resources on cognitive tasks, especially working memory tasks, to explore and exploit possible transfer effects to general cognitive abilities, such as fluid intelligence. The increased research attention has produced mixed findings, as well as contention about the disposition of the evidence base. To address this contention, Au et al. (2014) recently conducted a meta-analysis of extant controlled experimental studies of n-back task training transfer effects on measures of fluid intelligence in healthy adults; the results of which showed a small training transfer effect. Using several approaches, the current review evaluated and re-analyzed the meta-analytic data for the presence of two different forms of small-study effects: (1) publication bias in the presence of low power and; (2) low power in the absence of publication bias. The results of these approaches showed no evidence of selection bias in the working memory training literature, but did show evidence of small-study effects related to low power in the absence of publication bias. While the effect size estimate identified by Au et al. (2014) provided the most precise estimate to date, it should be interpreted in the context of a uniformly low-powered base of evidence. The present work concludes with a brief set of considerations for assessing the adequacy of a body of research findings for the application of meta-analytic techniques.
Effect of Microbial Inoculants on the Indigenous Actinobacterial Endophyte Population in the Roots of Wheat as Determined by Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism

ABSTRACT The effect of single actinobacterial endophyte seed inoculants and a mixed microbial soil inoculant on the indigenous endophytic actinobacterial population in wheat roots was investigated by using the molecular technique terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP). Wheat was cultivated either from seeds coated with the spores of single pure actinobacterial endophytes of Microbispora sp. strain EN2, Streptomyces sp. strain EN27, and Nocardioides albus EN46 or from untreated seeds sown in soil with and without a commercial mixed microbial soil inoculant. The endophytic actinobacterial population within the roots of 6-week-old wheat plants was assessed by T-RFLP. Colonization of the wheat roots by the inoculated actinobacterial endophytes was detected by T-RFLP, as were 28 to 42 indigenous actinobacterial genera present in the inoculated and uninoculated plants. The presence of the commercial mixed inoculant in the soil reduced the endophytic actinobacterial diversity from 40 genera to 21 genera and reduced the detectable root colonization by approximately half. The results indicate that the addition of a nonadapted microbial inoculum to the soil disrupted the natural actinobacterial endophyte population, reducing diversity and colonization levels. This was in contrast to the addition of a single actinobacterial endophyte to the wheat plant, where the increase in colonization level could be confirmed even though the indigenous endophyte population was not adversely affected.
Magnetic AC Loss Characteristics of 2G Roebel Cable

Roebel cable has been successfully manufactured using second generation (2G) YBCO wire. Roebel shaped strands of width 2 mm and a transposition length of 90 mm were cut from 40 mm wide tape supplied by American Superconductor Corporation. The tape has a weakly ferromagnetic Ni-5 at%W alloy substrate. Eleven insulated strands were assembled to form the cable. This paper reports results for the magnetic AC loss as a function of field amplitude for an insulated 2G Roebel strand and insulated multi-strand Roebel cable in perpendicular and parallel field orientation. In parallel field, the loss at the highest field amplitude measured is reduced by a factor of approximately 30 below the losses in the perpendicular field. In perpendicular field, the losses at the low field amplitude of the Roebel cable sample is influenced by the magnetic substrate. At high field amplitudes ( >0.1 T), the cable and total strand loss converge as expected for an insulated cable, where coupling currents are absent.
Beta Oscillatory Changes and Retention of Motor Skills during Practice in Healthy Subjects and in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

Recently we found that modulation depth of beta power during movement increases with practice over sensory-motor areas in normal subjects but not in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). As such changes might reflect use-dependent modifications, we concluded that reduction of beta enhancement in PD represents saturation of cortical plasticity. A few questions remained open: What is the relation between these EEG changes and retention of motor skills? Would a second task exposure restore beta modulation enhancement in PD? Do practice-induced increases of beta modulation occur within each block? We thus recorded EEG in patients with PD and age-matched controls in two consecutive days during a 40-min reaching task divided in fifteen blocks of 56 movements each. The results confirmed that, with practice, beta modulation depth over the contralateral sensory-motor area significantly increased across blocks in controls but not in PD, while performance improved in both groups without significant correlations between behavioral and EEG data. The same changes were seen the following day in both groups. Also, beta modulation increased within each block with similar values in both groups and such increases were partially transferred to the successive block in controls, but not in PD. Retention of performance improvement was present in the controls but not in the patients and correlated with the increase in day 1 modulation depth. Therefore, the lack of practice-related increase beta modulation in PD is likely due to deficient potentiation mechanisms that permit between-block saving of beta power enhancement and trigger mechanisms of memory formation.
Contribution THE ROLE OF AVIAN METAPENUMOVIRUS IN RESPIRATORY COMPLEX DISEASE CIRCULATING IN BROILERS IN NORTHERN IRAN

Avian metapneumovirus (aMPV) is the etiologic agent of a respiratory disease of poultry. In a 6 months period from October 2012 to March 2013, broiler flocks with respiratory signs are examined in northern Iran. The purpose of the given research was to define presence of antibodies of the birds’ avian metapneumovirus among broilers and detection of virus. Birds were not vaccinated against this virus. Total 525 blood samples and trachea/nasal turbinates swabs were obtained from 35 commercial broiler flocks and pooled (5 swabs/pool), then RT-PCR method was done on these 105 pooled samples. Presence of antibodies against the bird's metapneumovirus in each serum sample has been tested by method of immune-enzyme analysis. 10 (28.5%) flocks had positive antibodies. Of the 35 flocks, 8 were positive by RT-PCR with Nd/Nx primers (23%). This is the first report of APV infection in northern Iran. Vaccination programs should be adjusted to include the APV vaccine to aid in the control of this respiratory disease in the Iranian poultry industry.