Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects: An Exploratory Field Study

In recent years, the metaphor of technical debt has received considerable attention, especially from the agile community. Still, despite the fact that agile practices are increasingly used in critical domains, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating the occurrence of technical debt in critical software development projects. The results of an exploratory field study conducted across several projects reveal that a variety of business and environmental factors cause the occurrence of technical debt in critical domains. Using Grounded Theory method, these factors are categorized as ambiguity of requirement, diversity of projects, inadequate knowledge management, and resource constraints to form a theoretical model. Following previous studies we suggest that integrating agile practices, such as iterative development, review meetings, and continuous testing, into common plan-driven processes enables development teams to better identify and manage technical debt.
Online services.

Fiserv Health provides a wealth of information and services to help you live a healthier lifestyle. Our Healthcare Advisor gives you interactive decision-making tools to help you make the best choice possible about your health condition and prescription drugs. Members in the PPO plan option will have access to health risk assessments, chat rooms and forums, wellness action guides, record keepers and more. If you are in the PPO plan, you will also have access to the Disease Management Condition Centers, where you can access surveys, research your condition and interact with our nurse case managers. In addition, we provide links to five excellent health information sites, monthly articles and a whole lot more.
Sickle cell disease: Pain, coping and quality of life in a study of adults in the UK.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the relationship between pain, coping, and quality of life in adult patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) in the UK, and to assess the influence of these factors on the utilization of health services. DESIGN: This cross-sectional study involved 96 adult patients with SCD attending hospitals in London. METHOD: Interview and questionnaire study involving standard measures of pain, health service utilization, coping responses (measured with the Coping Strategies Questionnaire - revised for SCD), and quality of life (measured by the SF36). Data concerning clinical history, complications and haemoglobin levels were also collected. RESULTS: The number and duration of painful sickle cell episodes in the past 12 months varied widely between patients. We found that 49.5% of accident and emergency visits and 45% of hospitalizations were of 10.4% (10) patients. Pain experience accounted for 12.3% of hospital and general practice service use, independently of age, sex, number of SCD complications and haemoglobin levels. Three higher order factors emerged from analysis of the coping strategies questionnaire, reflecting active behavioural and cognitive coping, affecting coping, and passive adherence (e.g. resting, taking fluids). Active coping was positively associated with the number of pain episodes, while passive adherence coping was related to pain intensity. Psychological coping was unrelated to health service utilization. Marked impairment on many dimensions of quality of life was apparent in the analyses of the SF36. Affective coping was associated with impaired quality of life independently of demographic and clinical variables. CONCLUSIONS: It is evident that sickle cell disease involves not only severe recurrent pain, but also other impairments in health-related quality of life. Psychological coping patterns are relevant both to the experience of pain, and to broader adjustment. Patients may benefit from interventions that enhance the use of appropriate pain coping techniques and other strategies to improve quality of life.
Recognition of head-and-shoulder face image using virtual frontal-view image

This paper addresses the problem of face recognition under varying poses. To recognize a face under different poses, one approach is to use a human face 3D model. This approach is flexible but the equipment for acquiring the 3D face image is very expensive. The second approach is view-based. However, the complexity of the system is very high, as it requires constructing a representation for each view. For a 3D rotation, construction of dozens of representations may be required. This paper proposes a new idea to transform the face with unknown pose into frontal view for recognition. To construct the virtual frontal view image, we have developed an algorithm for detecting facial landmarks, which are then used to estimate the orientation of the face. A generic 3D spring-based face model is developed to transform the unknown face image into virtual frontal-view image. Finally, a spectroface method, which is based on wavelet transform and Fourier transform, is developed to recognize the virtual frontal face image. The proposed method has been tested by 1145 face images from 85 persons with different poses, facial expressions and small occlusions. The recognition accuracy for the best match is 84.7%. If we consider the top three matches, the accuracy increases to 92.9%.
Lipid II Is an Intrinsic Component of the Pore Induced by Nisin in Bacterial Membranes*

The peptidoglycan layers surrounding bacterial membranes are essential for bacterial cell survival and provide an important target for antibiotics. Many antibiotics have mechanisms of action that involve binding to Lipid II, the prenyl chain-linked donor of the peptidoglycan building blocks. One of these antibiotics, the pore-forming peptide nisin uses Lipid II as a receptor molecule to increase its antimicrobial efficacy dramatically. Nisin is the first example of a targeted membrane-permeabilizing peptide antibiotic. However, it was not known whether Lipid II functions only as a receptor to recruit nisin to bacterial membranes, thus increasing its specificity for bacterial cells, or whether it also plays a role in pore formation. We have developed a new method to produce large amounts of Lipid II and variants thereof so that we can address the role of the lipid-linked disaccharide in the activity of nisin. We show here that Lipid II is not only the receptor for nisin but an intrinsic component of the pore formed by nisin, and we present a new model for the pore complex that includes Lipid II.
Submergence-Induced Morphological, Anatomical, and Biochemical Responses in a Terrestrial Species Affect Gas Diffusion Resistance and Photosynthetic Performance

Gas exchange between the plant and the environment is severely hampered when plants are submerged, leading to oxygen and energy deficits. A straightforward way to reduce these shortages of oxygen and carbohydrates would be continued photosynthesis under water, but this possibility has received only little attention. Here, we combine several techniques to investigate the consequences of anatomical and biochemical responses of the terrestrial species Rumex palustris to submergence for different aspects of photosynthesis under water. The orientation of the chloroplasts in submergence-acclimated leaves was toward the epidermis instead of the intercellular spaces, indicating that underwater CO2 diffuses through the cuticle and epidermis. Interestingly, both the cuticle thickness and the epidermal cell wall thickness were significantly reduced upon submergence, suggesting a considerable decrease in diffusion resistance. This decrease in diffusion resistance greatly facilitated underwater photosynthesis, as indicated by higher underwater photosynthesis rates in submergence-acclimated leaves at all CO2 concentrations investigated. The increased availability of internal CO2 in these “aquatic” leaves reduced photorespiration, and furthermore reduced excitation pressure of the electron transport system and, thus, the risk of photodamage. Acclimation to submergence also altered photosynthesis biochemistry as reduced Rubisco contents were observed in aquatic leaves, indicating a lower carboxylation capacity. Electron transport capacity was also reduced in these leaves but not as strongly as the reduction in Rubisco, indicating a substantial increase of the ratio between electron transport and carboxylation capacity upon submergence. This novel finding suggests that this ratio may be less conservative than previously thought.
Inhibition of Hepatitis C Virus Replicon RNA Synthesis by PSI-352938, a Cyclic Phosphate Prodrug of β-d-2′-Deoxy-2′-α-Fluoro-2′-β-C-Methylguanosine

ABSTRACT PSI-352938 is a novel cyclic phosphate prodrug of β-d-2′-deoxy-2′-α-fluoro-2′-β-C-methylguanosine 5′-monophosphate that has potent activity against hepatitis C virus (HCV) in vitro. The studies described here characterize the in vitro anti-HCV activity of PSI-352938, alone and in combination with other inhibitors of HCV, and the cross-resistance profile of PSI-352938. The effective concentration required to achieve 50% inhibition for PSI-352938, determined using genotype 1a-, 1b-, and 2a-derived replicons stably expressed in the Lunet cell line, were 0.20, 0.13, and 0.14 μM, respectively. The active 5′-triphosphate metabolite, PSI-352666, inhibited recombinant NS5B polymerase from genotypes 1 to 4 with comparable 50% inhibitory concentrations. In contrast, PSI-352938 did not inhibit the replication of hepatitis B virus or human immunodeficiency virus in vitro. PSI-352666 did not significantly affect the activity of human DNA and RNA polymerases. PSI-352938 and its cyclic phosphate metabolites did not affect the cyclic GMP-mediated activation of protein kinase G. Clearance studies using replicon cells demonstrated that PSI-352938 cleared cells of HCV replicon RNA and prevented replicon rebound. An additive to synergistic effect was observed when PSI-352938 was combined with other classes of HCV inhibitors, including alpha interferon, ribavirin, NS3/4A inhibitors, an NS5A inhibitor, and nucleoside/nucleotide and nonnucleoside inhibitors. Cross-resistance studies showed that PSI-352938 remained fully active against replicons containing the S282T or the S96T/N142T amino acid alteration. Replicons that contain mutations conferring resistance to various classes of nonnucleoside inhibitors also remained sensitive to inhibition by PSI-352938. PSI-352938 is currently being evaluated in a phase I clinical study in genotype 1-infected individuals.
Association of Bacillus anthracis Capsule with Lethal Toxin during Experimental Infection

ABSTRACT Bacillus anthracis lethal toxin (LT) was characterized in plasma from infected African Green monkeys, rabbits, and guinea pigs. In all cases, during the terminal phase of infection only the protease-activated 63-kDa form of protective antigen (PA63) and the residual 20-kDa fragment (PA20) were detected in the plasma. No uncut PA with a molecular mass of 83 kDa was detected in plasma from toxemic animals during the terminal stage of infection. PA63 was largely associated with lethal factor (LF), forming LT. Characterization of LT by Western blotting, capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and size exclusion chromatography revealed that the antiphagocytic poly-γ-d-glutamic acid (γ-DPGA) capsule released from B. anthracis bacilli was associated with LT in animal blood in variable amounts. While the nature of this in vivo association is not understood, we were able to determine that a portion of these LT/γ-DPGA complexes retained LF protease activity. Our findings suggest that the in vivo LT complexes differ from in vitro-produced LT and that including γ-DPGA when examining the effects of LT on specific immune cells in vitro may reveal novel and important roles for γ-DPGA in anthrax pathogenesis.
Collection of acrosome‐reacted human sperm using monoclonal antibody‐coated paramagnetic beads

A monoclonal antibody (MAb) against human acrosome‐reacted sperm was attached to paramagnetic polystyrene beads. Human sperm prepared by the swim‐up method were (1) incubated in m‐BWW, (2) incubated and ionophore treated, or (3) incubated with 5% seminal fluid. After treatment, sperm were mixed with the beads and incubated for 1 hr. Variously treated sperm showed different binding abilities to the beads. Sperm bound to the beads were collected by a magnet and subjected to triple staining. Most of the collected sperm were acrosome reacted. The results suggested that the beads can be used to estimate the acrosomal status of sperm, and that the use of antibody‐coated paramagnetic beads provides a convenient way of collecting acrosome‐reacted sperm. The acrosomal status detected by the beads was also compared with the ability of sperm to fuse with zonafree hamster eggs. It was found that greater bead‐binding ability correlated with more sperm fusing with zona‐free hamster eggs.
Myosin II is involved in capping and uroid formation in the human pathogen Entamoeba histolytica

The redistribution and capping of surface receptors on the human pathogen Entamoeba histolytica was observed in the presence of concanavalin A (ConA). Capping was correlated with plasma membrane folding towards the rear of the amoeba and with uroid formation. The uroid is thought to play a role in the escape of amoebae from the host immune response. To localize myosin II during capping, amoebae were incubated in the presence of ConA and then analyzed by microscopy. Myosin II was three times more concentrated within the uroid compared with the rest of the cell, suggesting that the release of caps may depend upon mechanical contraction driven by myosin II activity. The use of drugs that disrupt cytoskeletal structure or that inhibit myosin heavy chain phosphorylation demonstrated that inhibition of capping prevents uroid formation. Biochemical analysis allowed the identification of two ConA receptors which have been previously described as major pathogenic antigens of this parasite: the 96-kDa antigen, which carries alcohol dehydrogenase 2 activity and binds extracellular matrix proteins, and the Gal-GalNAc-inhibitable surface lectin, which is involved in amoeba-cell interactions and in the degradation of complement particles attached to the parasite.
Hippocampus ghrelin signaling mediates appetite through lateral hypothalamic orexin pathways

Feeding behavior rarely occurs in direct response to metabolic deficit, yet the overwhelming majority of research on the biology of food intake control has focused on basic metabolic and homeostatic neurobiological substrates. Most animals, including humans, have habitual feeding patterns in which meals are consumed based on learned and/or environmental factors. Here we illuminate a novel neural system regulating higher-order aspects of feeding through which the gut-derived hormone ghrelin communicates with ventral hippocampus (vHP) neurons to stimulate meal-entrained conditioned appetite. Additional results show that the lateral hypothalamus (LHA) is a critical downstream substrate for vHP ghrelin-mediated hyperphagia and that vHP ghrelin activated neurons communicate directly with neurons in the LHA that express the neuropeptide, orexin. Furthermore, activation of downstream orexin-1 receptors is required for vHP ghrelin-mediated hyperphagia. These findings reveal novel neurobiological circuitry regulating appetite through which ghrelin signaling in hippocampal neurons engages LHA orexin signaling. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.11190. 001
Race/Ethnicity and Multiple Cancer Risk Factors among Individuals Seeking Smoking Cessation Treatment

Smoking in combination with other behavioral risk factors is known to have a negative influence on health, and individuals who smoke typically engage in multiple risk behaviors. However, little is known about the clustering of risk behaviors among smokers of varying race/ethnicity. The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of cancer risk behaviors and to identify predictors of multiple risk behaviors in a racially/ethnically diverse sample of individuals seeking smoking cessation treatment. Overweight/obesity, at-risk alcohol consumption, and insufficient physical activity were measured in 424 smokers (African American, n = 144; Latino, n = 141; and Caucasian, n = 139). Results indicated that 90% of participants reported behavioral cancer risk factors in addition to smoking. Approximately 70% of participants were overweight or obese, 48% engaged in at-risk drinking, and 27% were insufficiently physically active. Univariate analyses indicated that race/ethnicity (P < 0.001), smoking level (P = 0.03), and marital status (P = 0.04) were significant predictors of multiple risk behaviors, although only race/ethnicity remained a significant predictor (P < 0.001), when gender, smoking level, age, education, household income, marital status, and health insurance status were included in a multivariate model. Multivariate analysis indicated that the odds of engaging in multiple risk behaviors were significantly higher among Latinos (odds ratio = 2.85) and African Americans (odds ratio = 1.86) than Caucasians. Our findings highlight the need for research aimed at identifying determinants of racial/ethnic differences in multiple risk behaviors and indicate the importance of developing culturally sensitive interventions that target multiple risk behaviors. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(11):2937–45)
The Symbiosis Regulator CbrA Modulates a Complex Regulatory Network Affecting the Flagellar Apparatus and Cell Envelope Proteins

ABSTRACT Sinorhizobium meliloti participates in a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with legume plant host species of the genera Medicago, Melilotus, and Trigonella. We recently identified an S. meliloti two-component sensory histidine kinase, CbrA, which is absolutely required to establish a successful symbiosis with Medicago sativa (K. E. Gibson, G. R. Campbell, J. Lloret, and G. C. Walker, J. Bacteriol. 188:4508-4521, 2006). In addition to having a symbiotic defect, the cbrA::Tn5 mutant also has free-living phenotypes that suggest a cell envelope perturbation. Because the bases for these phenotypes are not well understood, we undertook an identification of CbrA-regulated genes. We performed a microarray analysis and compared the transcriptome of the cbrA::Tn5 mutant to that of the wild type. Our global analysis of gene expression identified 162 genes that are differentially expressed in the cbrA::Tn5 mutant, including those encoding proteins involved in motility and chemotaxis, metabolism, and cell envelope function. With regard to those genes with a known role in symbiosis, we observed increased expression of nine genes with overlapping functions in bacterial invasion of its host, which suggests that the mutant could be competent for invasion. Since these CbrA-repressed genes are vital to the invasion process, it appears that down-regulation of CbrA activity is important at this stage of nodule development. In contrast, our previous work showed that CbrA is required for bacteria to establish themselves within the host as nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Therefore, we propose a model in which CbrA functions as a developmental switch during symbiosis.
Runtime-Aware Architectures: A First Approach

In the last few years, the traditional ways to keep the increase of hardware performance at the rate predicted by Moore's Law have vanished. When uni-cores were the norm, hardware design was decoupled from the software stack thanks to a well defined Instruction Set Architecture ISA. This simple interface allowed developing applications without worrying too much about the underlying hardware, while hardware designers were able to aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism ILP in superscalar processors. With the irruption of multi-cores and parallel applications, this simple interface started to leak. As a consequence, the role of decoupling again applications from the hardware was moved to the runtime system. Efficiently using the underlying hardware from this runtime without exposing its complexities to the application has been the target of very active and prolific research in the last years.Current multi-cores are designed as simple symmetric multiprocessors SMP on a chip. However, we believe that this is not enough to overcome all the problems that multi-cores already have to face. It is our position that the runtime has to drive the design of future multi-cores to overcome the restrictions in terms of power, memory, programmability and resilience that multi-cores have. In this paper, we introduce a first approach towards a Runtime-Aware Architecture RAA, a massively parallel architecture designed from the runtime's perspective.
Cooperative caching for spectrum access in cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we investigate cooperative caching for spectrum access in cognitive radio networks. By cooperative caching, we mean that the unlicensed secondary base station (SBS) can cache certain primary contents to serve primary users, in exchange for the opportunities to access the licensed spectrum. We consider the joint optimization of caching and scheduling of the SBS to maximize the weighted average number of satisfied secondary requests under the average available time constraint and the cache capacity constraint. This problem is a mixed-integer bilinear programming, which is challenging in general. By exploring the special structure of the problem, we first show that the optimal caching satisfies a cache-split structure and the optimal scheduling satisfies a rate-ratio structure. Then, based on these optimality properties, we transform the original problem into a simplified joint cache splitting and SU partitioning optimization problem, and propose an efficient algorithm to solve it optimally. Moreover, we investigate the impacts of the primary and secondary content popularity distributions on the system performance. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis and provide some counter-intuitive insights.
Computing the power of a t test

Power is defined as the probability of correctly detecting an effect. It is often noted , where the converse, is the probability of a type-II error (not rejecting H0 when there is an effect). When planning a new experiment, it is generally recommended to have a power of at least . 80. Suppose that your design has very little power and suppose further that you found a significant effect. Since you were unlikely to detect it (low power), there are many chances that this effect is truly a type-I error (whose probability, often 5%, is noted ®). Given the fact that you found an effect (and that the presence of an effect is as likely as its absence), the posterior probability that your finding is a type-I error is given by . Hence, with a power of . 10 (very low power), it represents a 33% chance of a type-I error rather than a true effect. The power of a 2-group t test depends, as with any statistical test, on three factors: the effect size, the level of significance and the sample size (Cohen, 1992). The larger the expected effect size is, the more powerful the test is likely to be. Likewise, setting the criterion level higher (e.g. .10 instead of .05) will increase power. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the possible results of a t test if there is truly no effect (blue) and if there is a medium effect (red). Increasing the criterion level causes
A Mixed Noise Removal Method Based on Total Variation

Due to the technology limits, digital images always include some defects, such as noise. Noise reduces image quality and affects the result of image processing. While in most cases, noise has Gaussian distribution, in biomedical images, noise is usually a combination of Poisson and Gaussian noises. This combination is naturally considered as a superposition of Gaussian noise over Poisson noise. In this paper, we propose a method to remove such a type of mixed noise based on a novel approach: we consider the superposition of noises like a linear combination. We use the idea of the total variation of an image intensity (brightness) function to remove this combination of noises.