Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lymphocyte and Antibody Responses Reduce Enterovirus 71 Lethality in Mice by Decreasing Tissue Viral Loads

ABSTRACT Enterovirus 71 (EV71) infects the central nervous system and causes death and long-term neurological sequelae in hundreds of thousands of young children, but its pathogenesis remains elusive. Immunopathological mechanisms have been suspected to contribute to the pathogenesis of neurological symptoms, so anti-inflammatory agents have been used to treat patients with neurological symptoms. The present study was therefore designed to investigate the functions of lymphocyte and antibody responses in EV71 infection using a mouse model. Immunohistochemical staining analysis revealed virus and three types of lymphocytes, B cells, CD4 T cells, and CD8 T cells, in the spinal cord of an EV71-infected patient who died. A study of mice showed that the levels of virus and lymphocytes in brains and antibody titers in sera were elevated during the time when the mice succumbed to death in a phenomenon analogous to that observed in patients. Further studies demonstrated that after infection, the disease severity, mortality, and tissue viral loads of mice deficient in B, CD4 T, or CD8 T cells were significantly higher than those of wild-type mice. In addition, treatment with a virus-specific antibody, but not a control antibody, before or after infection significantly reduced the disease severity, mortality, and tissue viral loads of mice deficient in B cells. Our results show that both lymphocyte and antibody responses protect mice from EV71 infection. Our study suggests the use of vaccines and virus-specific antibodies to control fatal outbreaks and raises caution over the use of corticosteroids to treat EV71-infected patients with neurological symptoms.
GAS-TO-PARTICLE CONVERSION PROCESS BETWEEN AMMONIA, ACID GASES, AND FINE PARTICLES IN THE ATMOSPHERE

Ammonia emissions are associated with many agricultural operations including animal and poultry operations, waste and wastewater treatment operations, and fertilizer and manure land applications. The fate of ammonia released to atmosphere is affected by interaction with other gases, aerosols, and fine particles. These interactions affect the gas-to-particle conversion. This process alters ammonia concentrations downwind from agricultural operations. However, experimental research and modeling of the gas-to-particle conversion processes in ammonia-rich environments is generally limited. This paper summarizes the state-ofthe-art knowledge related to gas-to-particle conversion of ammonia. Ammonia and inorganic acid gases emitted from livestock and poultry operations and manure treatment, handling and application can affect air quality by formation of secondary particulate in the fine, PM2.5 range (a regulated air pollutant). The process of gas-to-particle conversion of relatively short-lived gaseous ammonia to more persistent fine particulate can affect local and regional air quality far away from the agricultural sources. Emissions of ammonia from livestock and poultry operations can potentially be detrimental to the air quality in non-compliance areas. Several models for the formation of fine PM from substrates such as ammonia are available and have been used for air quality modeling on a local and regional scale. These models can be adapted or modified to include emissions of ammonia and acid gases from livestock and poultry
Semantic Processing of Legal Texts ( SPLeT-2012 ) Workshop Programme 9 : 0011 : 30 – General Session

Methodological issues concerning the design and the development of TEMIS, a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus of Italian legislative texts, are presented and discussed in the paper. TEMIS is a heterogeneous collection of texts exemplifying different sub–varieties of Italian legal language, i.e. European, national and local texts. The whole corpus has been dependency annotated and a subset has been enriched with frame–based information by customizing the formalism of the FrameNet project. In both cases, a number of domain–specific extensions of the annotation criteria developed for the general language has been foreseen. The interest in building such a corpus stems from the increasing need for annotated collections of domain–specific texts recognized by both the Artificial Intelligence and Law (AI&Law) community and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) one. In two research communities the benefits of having a resource where both domain–specific content and its underlying linguistic structure are made explicit and aligned are widely acknowledged. To the author knowledge, this is the first annotated corpus of legal texts overtly devoted to be used for legal text processing applications based on NLP tools.
Electrothermal tuning and SNR of nanoelectromechanical resonators

Effects of electrothermal tuning mechanisms for nanoelectromechnical resonators are demonstrated. Voltages induced by oscillation of Al/SiC nanoresonators in a moderate magnetic filed are measured using a room-temperature tabletop setup in moderate vacuum. The dynamic range as well as the resonance frequency of the resonator can be reversibly controlled by electrothermal tuning using DC voltage. This paper presents experimental results on the resonance frequency, Q factor and dynamic range during the electrothermal tuning. As the input DC power increases, Q factor decreases due to the decrease in the resonance frequency, and SNR decreases due to the reduced amplitude or increased noise.
Derandomizing semidefinite programming based approximation algorithms

Remarkable breakthroughs have been made recently in obtaining approximate solutions to some fundamental NP-Complete problems, namely Max-Cut, Max k-Cut, Max-Sat, Max-Dicut, Max-Bisection, k Vertex Coloring, Independent Set, etc. These breakthroughs all involve polynomial time randomized algorithms based upon semidefinite programming, a technique pioneered by M. Goemans and D. Williamson (1994). In this paper, we give techniques to derandomize the above class of randomized algorithms, thus obtaining polynomial time deterministic algorithms with the same approximation ratios for the above problems. Note that Goemans and Williamson also gave an elegant method to derandomize their Max-Cut algorithm. We show here that their technique has a fatal flaw. The techniques we subsequently develop are very different from theirs. At the heart of our technique is the use of spherical symmetry to convert a nested sequence of n integrations, which cannot be approximated sufficiently well in polynomial time, to a nested sequence of just a constant number of integrations, which can be approximated sufficiently well in polynomial time.
Generic Image Classification Approaches Excel on Face Recognition

The main finding of this work is that the standard image classification pipeline, which consists of dictionary learning, feature encoding, spatial pyramid pooling and linear classification, outperforms all state-of-the-art face recognition methods on the tested benchmark datasets (we have tested on AR, Extended Yale B, the challenging FERET, and LFW-a datasets). This surprising and prominent result suggests that those advances in generic image classification can be directly applied to improve face recognition systems. In other words, face recognition may not need to be viewed as a separate object classification problem. While recently a large body of residual based face recognition methods focus on developing complex dictionary learning algorithms, in this work we show that a dictionary of randomly extracted patches (even from non-face images) can achieve very promising results using the image classification pipeline. That means, the choice of dictionary learning methods may not be important. Instead, we find that learning multiple dictionaries using different low-level image features often improve the final classification accuracy. Our proposed face recognition approach offers the best reported results on the widely-used face recognition benchmark datasets. In particular, on the challenging FERET and LFW-a datasets, we improve the best reported accuracies in the literature by about 20% and 30% respectively.
Characterization and evaluation of a self-microemulsifying drug delivery system containing tectorigenin, an isoflavone with low aqueous solubility and poor permeability

Abstract The purpose of this study was to characterize and evaluate tectorigenin-loaded self-microemulsifying drug delivery system (TG-SMEDDS), a previously studied preparation, and further confirm the improvement of TG in solubility and bioavailability. The appearance of TG-SMEDDS was clear and transparent, with good mobility. The microemulsion formed by TG-SMEDDS was globular, edge smooth, clear-cut, and distribution homogeneous under transmission electron microscope. The stability studies revealed that TG-SMEDDS remained stable at room temperature for at least 3 months. TG-SMEDDS showed excellent dissolution behavior that more than 90% of TG was released in only 5 min. The in situ intestinal perfusion studies indicated enhancement of absorption in four tested intestinal segments, and the main absorption site of TG was changed to duodenum. In addition, TG-SMEDDS showed significantly higher C max and AUC values (11-fold and 5-fold higher values, respectively; P < 0.05) than TG, and the absolute oral bioavailability of TG-SMEDDS was 56.33% (5-fold higher than that of crude TG). What’s more, the AUC0-t of crude TG and TG-SMEDDS in bile duct non-ligation rats were 6.05 and 2.80 times, respectively, than that in bile duct ligation rats, indicating the existence of enterohepatic circulation and the secretion of bile could significantly affect the absorption of TG. Further studies showed that even the bile duct was ligation, TG-SMEDDS can still keep a better oral bioavailability (179.67%, compared with crude TG in the bile duct non-ligation rats). Therefore, our study implies that SMEDDS containing TG could be an effective strategy for the oral administration of TG.
Evaluation of freeze-substitution and conventional embedding protocols for routine electron microscopic processing of eubacteria

Freeze-substitution and more conventional embedding protocols were evaluated for their accurate preservation of eubacterial ultrastructure. Radioisotopes were specifically incorporated into the RNA, DNA, peptidoglycan, and lipopolysaccharide of two isogenic derivatives of Escherichia coli K-12 as representative gram-negative eubacteria and into the RNA and peptidoglycan of Bacillus subtilis strains 168 and W23 as representative gram-positive eubacteria. Radiolabeled bacteria were processed for electron microscopy by conventional methods with glutaraldehyde fixation, osmium tetroxide postfixation, dehydration in either a graded acetone or ethanol series, and infiltration in either Spurr or Epon 812 resin. A second set of cells were simultaneously freeze-substituted by plunge-freezing in liquid propane, substituting in anhydrous acetone containing 2% (wt/vol) osmium tetroxide, and 2% (wt/vol) uranyl acetate, and infiltrating in Epon 812. Extraction of radiolabeled cell components was monitored by liquid scintillation counting at all stages of processing to indicate retention of cell labels. Electron microscopy was also used to visually confirm ultrastructural integrity. Radiolabeled nucleic acid and wall components were extracted by both methods. In conventionally embedded specimens, dehydration was particularly damaging, with ethanol-dehydrated cells losing significantly more radiolabeled material during dehydration and subsequent infiltration than acetone-treated cells. For freeze-substituted specimens, postsubstitution washes in acetone were the most deleterious step for gram-negative cells, while infiltration was more damaging for gram-positive cells. Autoradiographs of specimens collected during freeze-substitution were scanned with an optical densitometer to provide an indication of freezing damage; the majority of label lost from freeze-substituted cells was a result of poor freezing to approximately one-half of the cell population, thus accounting for the relatively high levels of radiolabel detected in the processing fluids. These experiments revealed that gram-positive and gram-negative cells respond differently to freezing; these differences are discussed with reference to wall structure. It was apparent that the cells frozen first (ie., the first to contact the cryogen) retained the highest percentage of all radioisotopes, and the highest level of cellular infrastructure, indicative of better preservation. The preservation of these select cells was far superior to that obtained by more conventional techniques.
Longitudinal studies of incidence and progression of diabetic retinopathy assessed by retinal photography in pima indians.

OBJECTIVE To examine incidence and progression of retinopathy using retinal photographs in Pima Indians and to compare the results with those obtained when retinopathy is assessed by direct ophthalmoscopy. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We undertook an analysis of examinations conducted between 1 April 1982 and 31 December 1990 in residents of the Gila River Community in central Arizona. Data were taken from 411 people with diabetes who had at least two examinations during this period. Incidence and progression of retinopathy were evaluated by retinal photography and fundoscopy, and hazard rate ratios were calculated for various potential risk factors measured at baseline. RESULTS Previously diagnosed retinopathy tended to progress, except in individuals with minimal nonproliferative retinopathy, among whom follow-up examinations were more likely to show no retinopathy. Diabetes duration (hazard rate ratio [HRR], 1.06 per year difference [P = 0.007]), hyperglycemia (HbA(1) HRR, 1.27 per 1% difference [P < 0.0001]), the type of treatment for diabetes (insulin use HRR, 3.06 [P = 0.0007], and oral hypoglycemic use HRR, 2.40 [P = 0.0034], compared with individuals on no pharmacotherapy), and macroalbuminuria (HRR, 2.86, compared with individuals without macroalbuminuria [P = 0.0486]) were associated with the development of retinopathy. Although fundoscopy detected fewer cases of retinopathy, HRRs for most risk factors were similar when retinopathy was assessed by fundoscopy rather than retinal photography. CONCLUSIONS Although retinopathy tends to worsen over time, some eyes show improvement, especially in patients with minimal nonproliferative retinopathy. As in other populations, glycemic control is the major modifiable risk factor for the development and progression of retinopathy.
The Impact of Selectional Preference Agreement on Semantic Relational Similarity

Relational similarity is essential to analogical reasoning. Automatically determining the degree to which a pair of words belongs to a semantic relation (relational similarity) is greatly improved by considering the selectional preferences of the relation. To determine selectional preferences, we induced semantic classes through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method that operates on dependency parse contexts of single words. When assigning relational similarities to pairs of words, if the agreement of selectional preferences is considered alone, a correlation of 0.334 is obtained against the manual ranking outperforming the previously best reported score of 0.229.
Using Time Series Analysis to Visualize and Evaluate Background Subtraction Results for Computer Vision Applications

Information visualization has proved its significance and importance for exploring and analysis of complex data. This paper introduces a novel framework for applying time series analysis and visualization methods to evaluate and compare the results of background subtraction algorithms for computer vision applications. Instead of judging the results of background subtraction algorithms by just viewing the resulted binary sequences which might not give enough insights about the results, we apply time series analysis and visualization to provide more details and insights of the results. The objective is to evaluate the results and possibly help to identify the weaknesses and strengthes of background subtraction algorithms which leads to further improvements for the performance of these algorithms.
A Fundamental misconception of modern linguistics

Abstract This paper proposes that the failure to systematically and clearly distinguish between the relational concept of constituency and the non-relational concept of unithood represents a confusion endemic to modern linguistics. The need to recognise this distinction is no mere piece of academic pedantry or sophistry, but has had important theoretical consequences; indeed, the failure to make the distinction has had damaging consequences, some of which are identified and explicated. It is proposed that the grammatical relation of constituency is a special subtype of the distributional relation ‘belongs to’; specifically, constituency relations are distributional relations that are also signs. Some consequences are explored in relation to the architecture of grammatical theory.
Comparing Human and Machine Errors in Conversational Speech Transcription

Recent work in automatic recognition of conversational telephone speech (CTS) has achieved accuracy levels comparable to human transcribers, although there is some debate how to precisely quantify human performance on this task, using the NIST 2000 CTS evaluation set. This raises the question what systematic differences, if any, may be found differentiating human from machine transcription errors. In this paper we approach this question by comparing the output of our most accurate CTS recognition system to that of a standard speech transcription vendor pipeline. We find that the most frequent substitution, deletion and insertion error types of both outputs show a high degree of overlap. The only notable exception is that the automatic recognizer tends to confuse filled pauses ("uh") and backchannel acknowledgments ("uhhuh"). Humans tend not to make this error, presumably due to the distinctive and opposing pragmatic functions attached to these words. Furthermore, we quantify the correlation between human and machine errors at the speaker level, and investigate the effect of speaker overlap between training and test data. Finally, we report on an informal "Turing test" asking humans to discriminate between automatic and human transcription error cases.
Saints and Servants in Southern Morocco

This anthropological monograph, dealing with a persistent form of social inequality in the Maghreb, examines the affinities between ancient hierarchical categorization and the emergence of new forms to impress and contest social ranking in the modern nation-state. Point of departure is a detailed account of the ambivalent relations between descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and a social group of humble descent called Haratin in a sanctuary located on the northern fringe of the Sahara. In sections on the division of labour, fictive kinship and supernatural mediation, the book shows how hierarchical ideas are transmitted and instilled in everyday life. The author demonstrates a sensitive ear for conflicting opinions on the meaning of ethnicity and descent-based distinctions. Richly situated in the anthropological literature, this monograph is a timely contribution to the study of ideologies of social inequality.
An ant system approach to Markov decision processes

In this paper, we develop an ant-system based algorithm for approximately solving large Markov decision process (MDP) problems for infinite horizon discounted cost criterion, extending the applicability of the ant-system meta-heuristic into stochastic sequential decision making problems. The algorithm inherits the spirit of the well-known policy iteration algorithm with an adaptation of the ant system into MDP settings with some modifications and extensions, while preserving the probabilistic convergence property of the ant system.
Reflecting on teaching: The influence of context

The nature of teaching and learning in higher education is dependent on a complex web of factors: the philosophy and personality of the faculty member, the characteristics of students, the discipline and the course content, the vision and the atmosphere of the institution, and the larger social context within which the teaching takes place. When any one of these factors changes, teaching changes. It is our intent in this paper to describe how faculty experience a change in teaching context, how that change leads to reflection on practice, and how beliefs and assumptions about teaching may be revised.
A Study of Program Evolution Involving Scattered Concerns

Before making a change to a system, software developers typically explore the source code to find and understand the subset relevant to their task. Software changes often involve code addressing different conceptually-related segments of the implementation (concerns), which can be scattered across multiple modules. These scattered concerns make it difficult to reason about the code relevant to a change. We carried out a study to investigate how developers discover and manage scattered concerns during a software evolution task, and the role that structural queries play during the investigation. The task we studied consists of a developer adding a feature to a 65kloc Java code base. The study involved eight subjects: four who were not briefed about scattered concerns, and four who were trained to use a concern-oriented investigation tool. Analysis of the navigation among the different program elements examined by the subjects during the task shows evidence that, independent of whether concernoriented tool support was available, the most successful subjects focused on specific concerns when planning their task, and used a high proportion of structural queries to investigate the code. In addition to the study results, this paper introduces two novel analyses: navigation graphs, which support the analysis of a subject’s behavior when investigating source code, and variant analysis, which is used for evaluating the results of a program evolution task.
SumVg: Total Heritability Explained by All Variants in Genome-Wide Association Studies Based on Summary Statistics with Standard Error Estimates

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have become increasingly popular these days and one of the key questions is how much heritability could be explained by all variants in GWAS. We have previously proposed an approach to answer this question, based on recovering the “true” z-statistics from a set of observed z-statistics. Only summary statistics are required. However, methods for standard error (SE) estimation are not available yet, thereby limiting the interpretation of the results. In this study we developed resampling-based approaches to estimate the SE and the methods are implemented in an R package. We found that delete-d-jackknife and parametric bootstrap approaches provide good estimates of the SE. Methods to compute the sum of heritability explained and the corresponding SE are implemented in the R package SumVg, available at https://sites.google. com/site/honcheongso/software/var-totalvg Contact pcsham@hku.hk, hcso85@gmail.com