Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anti-Peroxyl Radical Quality and Antibacterial Properties of Rooibos Infusions and Their Pure Glycosylated Polyphenolic Constituents

The anti-peroxyl radical quality of two aqueous rooibos infusions and solutions of their most abundant glycosylated polyphenols was evaluated using pyrogallol red and fluorescein-based oxygen radical absorbance ratios. It was observed that the artificial infusions, prepared using only the most abundant polyphenols present in rooibos and at concentrations similar to those found in the natural infusions, showed greater antioxidant quality than the latter infusions, reaching values close to those reported for tea infusions. Additionally, the antimicrobial activity of the natural and artificial infusions was assessed against three species of bacteria: Gram (+) Staphylococcus epidermidis and Staphylococcus aureus and Gram (−) Escherichia coli. When compared to the natural infusions the artificial beverages did not demonstrate any bacterostatic/cidal activity, suggesting that the antibacterial activity of rooibos is related to compounds other than the glycosylated polyphenols employed in our study.
Molecular and Phylogenetic Analysis of a Novel Turkey-Origin Picobirnavirus

SUMMARY A previous metagenomic analysis of the turkey gut RNA virus community identified novel enteric viruses that may play roles in poultry enteric diseases or in performance problems noted in the field. As part of the molecular characterization of these novel enteric viruses, a reverse transcriptase–PCR diagnostic assay was developed, targeting a novel turkey-origin picobirnavirus (PBV) initially identified in a pooled intestinal sample from turkey poults in North Carolina. Little detailed molecular information exists regarding the family Picobirnaviridae, particularly for the PBVs that have been described in avian species. This diagnostic assay targets the turkey PBV RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene and produces an 1135-bp amplicon. This assay was validated using in vitro transcribed RNA and was tested using archived enteric samples collected from turkey flocks in the southeastern United States. Further, a phylogenetic analysis suggests the turkey PBV is unique because it does not group closely with the recognized PBV genogroups circulating in mammalian hosts. RESUMEN Nota de Investigación—Análisis molecular y filogenético de un nuevo Picobirnavirus originado en pavos. Mediante un previo análisis metagenómico de una comunidad de virus ARN intestinales de los pavos, se identificaron nuevos virus entéricos que pueden ser importantes en las enfermedades entéricas de las aves comerciales o en los problemas en la productividad observados en el campo. Como parte de la caracterización molecular de estos nuevos virus entéricos, se desarrolló un ensayo diagnóstico de transcripción reversa y PCR, dirigido a un picobirnavirus nuevo de origen en los pavos (PBV), que fue inicialmente identificado en un grupo de muestras intestinales combinadas de pavos de Carolina del Norte. Existe poca información molecular detallada sobre la familia Picobirnaviridae, en particular para los picobirnavirus que han sido descritos en las especies aviares. Este ensayo de diagnóstico está dirigido al gene de la polimerasa de ARN dependiente de ARN del picobirnavirus de los pavos y produce un amplicón de 1135 pares de bases. Este ensayo fue validado utilizando ARN transcrito in vitro y se puso a prueba utilizando muestras entéricas archivadas que fueron recolectadas de parvadas de pavos en el sureste de los Estados Unidos. Los análisis filogenéticos posteriores sugieren que el picobirnavirus de los pavos es único, ya que no se agrupa estrechamente con los genogrupos de picobirnavirus reconocidos que circulan en huéspedes mamíferos.
The Improving Efficiency Frontier of Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospitals

This study uses a linear programming technique called data envelopment analysis to identify changes in the efficiency frontier of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals after implementation of the prospective payment system. The study provides a time series analysis of the efficiency frontier for inpatient rehabilitation hospitals in 2003 immediately after implementation of PPS and then again in 2006. Results indicate that the efficiency frontier of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals increased from 84% in 2003 to 85% in 2006. Similarly, an analysis of slack or inefficiency shows improvements in output efficiency over the study period. This clearly documents that efficiency in the inpatient rehabilitation hospital industry after implementation of PPS is improving. Hospital executives, health care policymakers, taxpayers, and other stakeholders benefit from studies that improve health care efficiency.
Rh proteins and NH4+-activated Na+-ATPase in the Magadi tilapia (Alcolapia grahami), a 100% ureotelic teleost fish

SUMMARY The small cichlid fish Alcolapia grahami lives in Lake Magadi, Kenya, one of the most extreme aquatic environments on Earth (pH ~10, carbonate alkalinity ~300 mequiv l−1). The Magadi tilapia is the only 100% ureotelic teleost; it normally excretes no ammonia. This is interpreted as an evolutionary adaptation to overcome the near impossibility of sustaining an NH3 diffusion gradient across the gills against the high external pH. In standard ammoniotelic teleosts, branchial ammonia excretion is facilitated by Rh glycoproteins, and cortisol plays a role in upregulating these carriers, together with other components of a transport metabolon, so as to actively excrete ammonia during high environmental ammonia (HEA) exposure. In Magadi tilapia, we show that at least three Rh proteins (Rhag, Rhbg and Rhcg2) are expressed at the mRNA level in various tissues, and are recognized in the gills by specific antibodies. During HEA exposure, plasma ammonia levels and urea excretion rates increase markedly, and mRNA expression for the branchial urea transporter mtUT is elevated. Plasma cortisol increases and branchial mRNAs for Rhbg, Rhcg2 and Na+,K+-ATPase are all upregulated. Enzymatic activity of the latter is activated preferentially by NH4+ (versus K+), suggesting it can function as an NH4+-transporter. Model calculations suggest that active ammonia excretion against the gradient may become possible through a combination of Rh protein and NH4+-activated Na+-ATPase function.
Species-Specific Type II Restriction-Modification System of Xylella fastidiosa Temecula1

ABSTRACT The transformation efficiency of Xylella fastidiosa can be increased by interfering with restriction by the strain-specific type II system encoded by the PD1607 and PD1608 genes. Here, we report results for two strategies: in vitro methylation using M.SssI and isolation of DNA from an Escherichia coli strain expressing the methylase PD1607.
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) Root Cuttings: Diversity and Identity Revealed by SSR Genotyping: A Case Study

Background and Purpose: Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) is a valuable species native to North America and today widely planted throughout the world for biomass production. In Hungary, where Robinia has great importance in the forest management, the clones have been selected for plantations on good, medium and poor quality sites. To conserve the identity, superior clones are vegetatively propagated by root cuttings. At times the collection of root cuttings can cause uncertainty for clonal identity because of the overlap of roots from neighboring plants. This can occur especially when the repository is damaged from severe environmental accidents and the planting layout has been lost. The aim of this study has been to verify by molecular markers the diversity or identity of black locust clones by root cuttings harvested in a damaged trial. Materials and Methods: Root cuttings of 91 clones belonging to five cultivars were collected in a trial severely damaged by storms and flooding periods. The obtained plantlets were analyzed with nine microsatellite (SSR) markers and the genetic identity/diversity within and among the plants was tested using the software GenAlEx version 6. Results: Multilocus genotypes (MLG) and the Paetkau’s assignation test (1985) revealed genetic variability among the samples: the analyzed plantlets were grouped in four classes instead of the five expected. In addition, 6 unique genotypes have been detected. Abstract 1 National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Institute of Agro-Environmental and Forest Biology (IBAF), Via Guglielmo Marconi 2, I-05010 Porano, Italy 2 National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, Forest Research Institute, Department of Tree Breeding, Várkerület 30/A, HU-9600 Sárvár, Hungary 3 National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, Forest Research Institute, Department of Plantation Forestry, Farkassziget 3, HU-4150 Püspökladány, Hungary
Identifying firsthand accounts of emergencies from social media

With the recent explosion in availability and use of internet social media, citizens now utilize these resources to transmit information quickly about events as they unfold. However, for responding personnel in emergency situations, it is often difficult to sift through the enormous quantity of data within such sources to find the most pertinent information. The ability to filter messages is critical to, for example, identify firsthand accounts from persons within the direct vicinity of events. Nevertheless, on social media platforms such as Twitter, location-based information is often missing or unreliable. This paper outlines an approach to probabilistically identify the likely locations of individuals on Twitter based on their content, and from socially connected users with more reliable geographic information. We utilize measurements of user content similarity and Gaussian mixture modeling to infer “hotspots” of the likely location of users in emergencies. We are able to achieve upwards of 70% accuracy of Twitter user home cities without using any prior knowledge of geographic boundaries to look within.
Fast Feature Reduction in intrusion detection datasets

In the most intrusion detection systems (IDS), a system tries to learn characteristics of different type of attacks by analyzing packets that sent or received in network. These packets have a lot of features. But not all of them is required to be analyzed to detect that specific type of attack. Detection speed and computational cost is another vital matter here, because in these types of problems, datasets are very huge regularly. In this paper we tried to propose a very simple and fast feature selection method to eliminate features with no helpful information on them. Result faster learning in process of redundant feature omission. We compared our proposed method with three most successful similarity based feature selection algorithm including Correlation Coefficient, Least Square Regression Error and Maximal Information Compression Index. After that we used recommended features by each of these algorithms in two popular classifiers including: Bayes and KNN classifier to measure the quality of the recommendations. Experimental result shows that although the proposed method can't outperform evaluated algorithms with high differences in accuracy, but in computational cost it has huge superiority over them.
Empirical-statistical analysis of amplitude SAR images for change detection algorithms

This paper presents an analysis of pre-filtered clutter VHF SAR images. The image data are reorganized into sub-vectors based on the observation of the image-pair magnitude samples. Based on this approach, we present a statistical description of the SAR clutter obtained by the subtraction between two real SAR images. The statistical analysis based on bivariate distribution data organized into different intervals of magnitude can be an important tool to further understand the properties of the backscattered signal, which can be a valuable premise for change detection processing.
Evaluation of Real-Time Audio-to-Score Alignment

This article explains evaluation methods for real-time audio to score alignment, or score following, that allow for the quantitative assessment of the robustness and preciseness of an algorithm. The published ground truth data base and the evaluation framework, including file formats for the score and the reference alignments, are presented. The work, started for MIREX 2006, is meant as a first step towards a standardized evaluation process contributing to the exchange and progress in this field. Score following is the real-time alignment of a known musical score to the audio signal produced by a musician playing this score, usually in order to synchronise an electronic accompaniment of the music to the performer, leaving him with all possibilities of expressive performance. Despite its history of more than 20 years [1], only very few attempts of a systematic evaluation of the result of score following have been made, and therefore, representation of research work is usually limited to demonstration of short examples or subjective ways to assess the quality of such systems. Evaluation gives an indication of the quality of an alignment algorithm and allows the comparison of different methods, implementations, parameters, etc., and the quantification of improvements gained by training. The lack of a unified common evaluation framework has led to different and personal approaches to the problem of score alignment. This clearly makes further progress of the problem more difficult and assessment of the results uncertain.
Spatial Conditioning of Transfer Functions Using Local Material Distributions

In many applications of Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) the importance of a certain material or feature is highly dependent on its relative spatial location. For instance, in the medical diagnostic procedure, the patient's symptoms often lead to specification of features, tissues and organs of particular interest. One such example is pockets of gas which, if found inside the body at abnormal locations, are a crucial part of a diagnostic visualization. This paper presents an approach that enhances DVR transfer function design with spatial localization based on user specified material dependencies. Semantic expressions are used to define conditions based on relations between different materials, such as only render iodine uptake when close to liver. The underlying methods rely on estimations of material distributions which are acquired by weighing local neighborhoods of the data against approximations of material likelihood functions. This information is encoded and used to influence rendering according to the user's specifications. The result is improved focus on important features by allowing the user to suppress spatially less-important data. In line with requirements from actual clinical DVR practice, the methods do not require explicit material segmentation that would be impossible or prohibitively time-consuming to achieve in most real cases. The scheme scales well to higher dimensions which accounts for multi-dimensional transfer functions and multivariate data. Dual-Energy Computed Tomography, an important new modality in radiology, is used to demonstrate this scalability. In several examples we show significantly improved focus on clinically important aspects in the rendered images.
Multivariate Nonlinear Regression with Semiparametric Latent Factor Models

We propose a semiparametric model for regression problems involving multiple response variables. Conditional dependencies between the responses are represented through a linear mixture of Gaussian processes. We propose an efficient approximate inference scheme for this semiparametric model whose complexity is linear in the number of training data points, and show how the mixing matrix and kernel parameters can be learned by empirical Bayesian techniques. Our inference technique exploits conditional independencies between the latent variables and can be seen as a variant of belief propagation with nonparametric messages. We present experimental results on a meteorological task.
Pathophysiology of vascular dysfunction in a rat model of chronic joint inflammation

The impact of chronic joint inflammation on articular vascular function in rats was investigated to address whether joint swelling and the associated vascular dysfunction are dependent upon a common prostanoid mechanism. Urinary nitrate/nitrite (NOx) and PGE2 excretion, knee joint diameter and body weight were measured following induction of adjuvant‐induced arthritis (AIA). Ten days postinduction of AIA, joint vascular reactivity was assessed by measuring the perfusion response using a laser Doppler imager (LDI) to topical application of acetylcholine (ACh) and sodium nitroprusside (SNP). Four groups were compared: a non‐inflamed control group and three AIA groups treated i.p. with vehicle, indomethacin or SC‐236 (at equimolar doses). The selective cyclooxygenase‐2 (COX‐2) inhibitor (SC‐236) was used to differentiate between COX‐1 and ‐2‐derived prostaglandins. Urinary NOx and PGE2 levels increased substantially during the early phase of AIA but decreased thereafter. Toxicity to indomethacin but not SC‐236 was observed, as indicated by a marked decrease in body weight. Joint swelling was similarly attenuated by indomethacin and SC‐236 (P= 0.0001 cf. vehicle‐treated AIA; n= 5–6 per group), indicating that this is due to COX‐2 and not COX‐1 inhibition. The AIA‐induced changes in urinary NOx and PGE2 were corrected by both COX inhibitors. While vascular reactivity to ACh and SNP was significantly attenuated by AIA (P < 0.002; n= 5–10 per group), the perfusion responses to these vasodilating agents were similar in all three AIA groups, demonstrating that the vascular dysfunction was not corrected by inhibition of either COX‐1 or COX‐2 enzymes. Furthermore, the attenuation of both ACh and SNP‐induced responses in AIA suggest that vascular dysfunction was not exclusively endothelial in nature. In conclusion, the joint swelling and vascular dysfunction associated with AIA appear to be mediated, at least in part, by independent mechanisms. While COX‐1/COX‐2 inhibition reduced joint swelling, vascular dysfunction in AIA is independent of constitutive or inducible prostanoid mechanisms, and appears not to be solely endothelial‐derived, but to involve other components such as the vascular smooth muscle.
DEXH Box RNA Helicase–Mediated Mitochondrial Reactive Oxygen Species Production in Arabidopsis Mediates Crosstalk between Abscisic Acid and Auxin Signaling[C][W][OA]

An Arabidopsis thaliana abscisic acid (ABA) overly sensitive mutant, abo6, was identified, and ABO6 was found to encode a DEXH box RNA helicase that regulates the splicing of genes of complex I in mitochondria. ABA and auxin signaling are shown to regulate primary root growth and seed germination via reactive oxygen species produced in mitochondria. It is well known that abscisic acid (ABA) promotes reactive oxygen species (ROS) production through plasma membrane–associated NADPH oxidases during ABA signaling. However, whether ROS from organelles can act as second messengers in ABA signaling is largely unknown. Here, we identified an ABA overly sensitive mutant, abo6, in a genetic screen for ABA-mediated inhibition of primary root growth. ABO6 encodes a DEXH box RNA helicase that is involved in regulating the splicing of several genes of complex I in mitochondria. The abo6 mutant accumulated more ROS in mitochondria, as established using a mitochondrial superoxide indicator, circularly permuted yellow fluorescent protein. Two dominant-negative mutations in ABA insensitive1 (abi1-1) and abi2-1 greatly reduced ROS production in mitochondria. The ABA sensitivity of abo6 can also be compromised by the atrbohF mutation. ABA-mediated inhibition of seed germination and primary root growth in abo6 was released by the addition of reduced GSH and exogenous auxin to the medium. Expression of auxin-responsive markers ProDR5:GUS (for synthetic auxin response element D1-4 with site-directed mutants in the 5′-end from soybean):β-glucuronidase) and Indole-3-acetic acid inducible2:GUS was greatly reduced by the abo6 mutation. Hence, our results provide molecular evidence for the interplay between ABA and auxin through the production of ROS from mitochondria. This interplay regulates primary root growth and seed germination in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Critically Theorizing the Global

Abstract Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education. Global education too often focuses on aspects of the far-away life of others while not attending to how global forces manifest in the most local of institutions, the school. This article examines the interrelationships of these phenomena in a period of hyper-globalization and considers the potential for rethinking global education as a counter-practice.
The contribution of anxiety and depression to fatigue among a sample of Australian university students: suggestions for university counsellors

Responses to the Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS: Zung, W. (1971). A rating instrument for anxiety disorders. Psychosomatics, 12, 371–379), the Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS: Zung, W. (1973). From art to science: The diagnosis and treatment of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 29, 328–337) and the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) developed by Krupp and colleagues (Krupp, L.B., LaRocca, N.G., Muir-Nash, J., & Steinberg, A.D. (1989). The fatigue severity scale: Application to patients with multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus. Archives of Neurology, 46, 1121–1123) were collected from 200 Australian university students to explore the links between these three disorders. Reliability data were satisfactory for all three scales and there were no significant gender or age-related differences between total scale scores. Factor analyses revealed a 5-factor solution for the SAS, a 6-factor solution for the SDS and a single factor for the FSS. There were 8 major and meaningful correlations found and these were entered into a regression of the SAS and SDS factor scores upon the single factor of the FSS. Fatigue factor scores were most powerfully predicted by psychomotor agitation, pain and resultant fatigue and cognitive and emotional arousal factor scores from the SAS and SDS. These data argue for an arousal/anxiety-fatigue-depression progression in disease that may be developmental or accumulative, with extreme levels of psychomotor arousal, resultant muscle fatigue and pain, plus concurrent elevated emotional state and cognitive arousal contributing to an eventual depletion of physical resources, leaving the individual in extreme fatigue. Implications for diagnosis and treatment by counsellors are discussed.
A double‐blind trial of the effect of docosahexaenoic acid and vitamin and mineral supplementation on aggression, impulsivity, and stress

Although a series of well‐designed studies have reported that supplementation with vitamins/minerals and omega‐3 fatty acids reduces the incidence of aggressive behavior, to date, the relative contribution and interaction between these nutrients has not been examined. The aim was therefore to consider the relative contribution of supplementation with multivitamins/minerals and/or docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) on laboratory‐based measures of aggression, impulsivity, and stress.