Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LuxS controls bacteriocin production in Streptococcus mutans through a novel regulatory component

The oral pathogen Streptococcus mutans employs a variety of mechanisms to maintain a competitive advantage over many other oral bacteria which occupy the same ecological niche. Production of the bacteriocin, mutacin I, is one such mechanism. However, little is known about the regulatory mechanisms associated with mutacin I production. Previous work has demonstrated that the production of mutacin I greatly increased with cell density. In this study, we found that high cell density also triggered high level mutacin I gene transcription. However, this response was abolished upon deletion of luxS. Further analysis using real‐time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) demonstrated that in the luxS mutant transcription of both the mutacin I structural gene mutA and the mutacin I transcriptional activator mutR was impaired. Through microarray analysis, a putative transcription repressor annotated as Smu1274 in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Oral Pathogens Sequence Database was identified, which was strongly induced in the luxS mutant. Characterization of Smu1274, which we referred to as irvA, suggested that it may act as an inducible repressor to suppress mutacin I gene expression. A luxS and irvA double mutant regained the ability to produce mutacin I; whereas a constitutive irvA‐producing strain was impaired in mutacin I production. These findings reveal a novel regulatory pathway for mutacin I gene expression, which may provide clues to the regulatory mechanisms of other cellular functions regulated by luxS in S. mutans.
Employment Status, Duration of Residence and Mental Health Among Skilled Migrants To New Zealand: Results of a Longitudinal Study

Aims: To report findings on employment, duration of residence and mental health from a longitudinal study of 107 skilled immigrants to New Zealand from the People's Republic of China, India and South Africa. Methods: Demographic and employment data were collected by face-to-face interviews using a structured questionnaire that included (as the mental health instrument) the General Health Questionnaire 12 (GHQ-12). The initial interview took place after the immigrants had been resident in New Zealand for an average of five months. Four subsequent interviews were conducted annually (1999—2002) on or about the anniversary of the first interview. Results and Conclusion: Rather than an initial euphoric period followed by a mental health crisis, the results indicated poor mental health status in the first two years irrespective of employment status. Thereafter, mental health slightly improved as did employment rates. A surprising result was that although the South Africans had the highest employment rate, there were neither substantial mental health differences among the three groups nor was there a significant improvement during the course of the longitudinal study.
Combined Effect of RF Impairment and CEE on the Performance of Dual-Hop Fixed-Gain AF Relaying

We study the performance of dual-hop fixed-gain (FG) amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems in the presence of both radio frequency impairments (RFI) and channel estimation error (CEE). The expression for end-to-end signal-to-noise plus distortion-and-error ratio is derived along with exact analytical expressions of outage probability (OP) over independent but non-identically distributed Nakagami-mi fading channel. Then, we perform an asymptotic analysis of OP at high SNR and find that there is an error floor on OP due to the effects of CEE. Although there is no direct effect of RFI on the error floor, the way in which it affects the value of CEE at high SNR and thus takes part in indirectly elevating the error floor is also looked into. The analytical results are validated through Monte Carlo simulation. Finally, the dominance of RFI and CEE at different transmission rates and average SNRs is also discussed.
Immunoregulatory effects of allogeneic mixed chimerism induced by nonmyeloablative bone marrow transplantation on chronic inflammatory arthritis and autoimmunity in interleukin-1 receptor antagonist-deficient mice.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the immunoregulatory effects of allogeneic mixed chimerism induced by T cell-depleted, nonmyeloablative bone marrow transplantation (BMT) on chronic inflammatory arthritis and autoimmunity in mice deficient in interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra). METHODS IL-1Ra(-/-) mice (H-2K(d)) were treated with antibody to asialoganglioside G(M1) (anti-natural killer cell), total body irradiation (500 cGy), and T cell-depleted, nonmyeloablative BMT derived from C57BL/6 mice (H-2K(b)). Engraftment and chimerism were evaluated in peripheral blood, lymph nodes, and spleen by multicolor flow cytometry. The severity of arthritis was evaluated by clinical scoring and histopathologic assessment. Levels of IgG1 and IgG2a subtypes of anti-type II collagen (anti-CII) antibodies were measured in serum samples. After T cells were stimulated with CII, ovalbumin, and phytohemagglutinin, T cell proliferative responses and levels of cytokine production (interferon-gamma [IFNgamma], tumor necrosis factor alpha [TNFalpha], interleukin-10 [IL-10], and IL-17) were assayed in culture supernatants. RESULTS All IL-1Ra(-/-) mice receiving BMT showed marked improvement in arthritis within 3 weeks, as well as successful induction of mixed chimerism. These mice showed higher levels of IgG1, and lower levels of IgG2a anti-CII antibodies and weaker T cell proliferative responses than did mice in the control groups (either no treatment or conditioning alone without bone marrow rescue). In mixed chimeras, the levels of IFNgamma, TNFalpha, and IL-17 produced from CII-stimulated T cells were significantly suppressed and IL-10 production was significantly higher as compared with controls. CONCLUSION The introduction of allogeneic mixed chimerism showed a strong immunoregulatory potential to correct established chronic inflammatory arthritis and autoimmunity originating from a dysregulated proinflammatory cytokine network.
192 IgG-saporin : I. Specific Lethality for Cholinergic Neurons in the Basal Forebrain of the Rat

An immunotoxin (IT) composed of a monoclonal antibody to the nerve growth factor (NGF) receptor, 192 IgG, chemically linked to saporin, 192 IgG-saporin, was shown to selectively reduce forebrain choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) activity in the rat brain following intraventricular administration. In order to determine if the IT was killing NGF receptorpositive neurons in the CBF (rather than simply suppressing the cholinergic phenotype in these cells), a population of neurons in the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) was prelabeled by an intracortical injection of the neurotracer Fluoro-Gold (FG) 1 week before intraventricular injections of IT or control substances (reduced IT or phosphate-buffered saline). We found that there were very few double-labeled (i.e. FG-labeled and ChAT-positive) neurons remaining in the NBM of ITtreated animals. The absolute number of FG-labeled neurons in the NBM of IT-treated animals was reduced by a number similar to the counts of double-labeled neurons in the NBM of control animals. Our conclusion is that the IT is preferentially lethal to cholinergic neurons in the NBM. Due to its ability to selectively kill cholinergic neurons in the CBF and concomitantly spare noncholinergic neurons with similar morphology and projections, 192 IgG-saporin can be used to produce a selective model of CBF deficit in the rat.
Adaptive control of dual user teleoperation with time delay and dynamic uncertainty

This technical note aims at proposing an adaptive control scheme for dual-master trilateral teleoperation in the presence of communication delay and dynamic uncertainty in the parameters. The majority of existing control schemes for trilateral teleoperation systems have been developed for linear systems or nonlinear systems without dynamic uncertainty or time delay. However, in the practical teleoperation applications, the dynamics equations are nonlinear and contain uncertain parameters. In addition, the time delay in the communication channel mostly exists in the real applications and can affect the stability of closed loop system. As a result, an adaptive control methodology is proposed in this paper that to guarantee the stability and performance of the system despite nonlinearity, dynamic uncertainties and time delay. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive controller methodology.
Experimental and computational analysis of a novel flow channel to assess the adhesion strength of sessile marine organisms

Bioadhesives produced by marine macroalgae represent a potential source of inspiration for the development of water-resistant adhesives. Assessing their adhesion strength, however, remains difficult owing to low volumes of adhesive material produced, low solubility and rapid curing time. These difficulties can be circumvented by testing the adhesion strength of macroalgae propagules attached to a substrate. In this paper, we present a simple, novel flow channel used to test the adhesion strength of the germlings of the fucalean alga Hormosira banksii to four substrates of biomedical relevance (PMMA, agar, gelatin and gelatin + lipid). The adhesion strength of H. banksii germlings was found to increase in a time-dependent manner, with minimal adhesion success after a settlement period of 6 h and maximum adhesion strength achieved 24 h after initial settlement. Adhesion success increased most dramatically between 6 and 12 h settlement time, while no additional increase in adhesion strength was recorded for settlement times over 24 h. No significant difference in adhesion strength to the various substrates was observed. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to estimate the influence of fluid velocity and germling density on drag force acting on the settled organisms. CFD modelling showed that, on average, the drag force decreased with increasing germling number, suggesting that germlings would benefit from gregarious settlement behaviour. Collectively, our results contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms allowing benthic marine organisms to thrive in hydrodynamically stressful environments and provide useful insights for further investigations.
SOME VARIANTS OF K-MEANS CLUSTERING WITH EMPHASIS ON IMAGE SEGMENTATION

In this paper we focus on some variants of K means clustering approach which can be used for image segmentation also. In k-means clustering, we are given a set of n data points in d-dimensional space and an integer k and the problem is to determine a set of k points in , called centers, so as to minimize the mean squared distance from each data point to its nearest center. A popular heuristic for k-means clustering is Lloyd's algorithm. In this paper we have analyzed and presented some extensions that increase its range of applicability.
Management Innovators: The People and Ideas that Have Shaped Modern Business

The survey of the field of management begins with Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, who failed to create a successful business based on it, and ends with Peter Drucker, who is probably the most respected management thinker in America today, but who has never run a business. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a specific figure and describes not only that person's contribution to the field, but explores the wider social context in which the person lived and worked. Figures explored include: Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Richard W. Sears, Alexander Graham Bell, J. Pierpont Morgan, Frederick W. Taylor, Alfred P. Sloan, and W. Edwards Deming.
microRNAs revive old views about jawless vertebrate divergence and evolution

Most living vertebrates are jawed vertebrates or gnathostomes, like sharks or mammals. However, two small fish groups, hagfishes (67 species) and lampreys (about 40 species), are devoid of jaws and are either ignored by the public or regarded as pests. Both are eel-shaped, cartilaginous, and scale-less, and their overall anatomy is roughly similar to that of other fishes, with a brain, spinal cord, and sensory capsule, although more simple than that of gnathostomes (Fig. 1). First regarded as intestinal worms or degenerate jawed vertebrates (1) and then gathered into a group, the cyclostomes (rounded mouth), on the basis of basic anatomical characteristics (horny teeth, pouch-shaped gills, single nostril, and lack of paired fins) (2), these fishes became finally considered in evolutionary times as a monophyletic offshoot of primitive vertebrates, sister group to jawed vertebrates (3), and this became the received view for most of the of the 20th century (4).
Secure-Access System via Fixed and Mobile Telephone Networks using Voice Biometrics

This paper presents a double-digit system for textdependent speaker verification and text validation that can be accessed with security via a telephone network. A speech recognition and a user authentication scheme are proposed that utilize concatenated phoneme HMMs and operate in a sound-prompted mode. The recognition performance of the system is evaluated through extended simulations on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) using Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP), Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), as well as Cepstral Mean Subtraction (CMS). The effect of various factors such as the length of the training data, the number of embedded re-estimations, and Gaussian mixtures in training of the HMMs, the use of world models, bootstrapping, and user-dependent thresholds on the performance of speech recognition and speaker verification is also examined.
Recherche par le contenu dans des documents audiovisuels multilingues

ABSTRACT. We present in this paper an approach based on the use of the International PhoneticAlphabet (IPA) for content-based indexing and retrieval of multilingual audiovisual documents.The approach works even if the languages of the document are unknown. It has been validatedin the context of the “Star Challenge” search engine competition organized by the A*STARAgency of Singapore. Our approach includes the building of an IPA-based multilingual acousticmodel and a dynamic programming based method for searching document segments by “IPAstring spotting”. Dynamic programming allows for retrieving the query string in the documentstring even with a signiﬁcant transcription error rate at the phone level. The methods that wedeveloped ranked us as ﬁrst and third on the monolingual (English) search task, as ﬁfth on themultilingual search task and as ﬁrst on the multimodal (audio and image) search task. MOTS-CLES : Recherche audio, Multilingue, Alphabet Phonetique International, ProgrammationDynamique, Star Challenge
Unsupervised 2D Dimensionality Reduction with Adaptive Structure Learning

Abstract In recent years, unsupervised two-dimensional (2D) dimensionality reduction methods for unlabeled large-scale data have made progress. However, performance of these degrades when the learning of similarity matrix is at the beginning of the dimensionality reduction process. A similarity matrix is used to reveal the underlying geometry structure of data in unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods. Because of noise data, it is difficult to learn the optimal similarity matrix. In this letter, we propose a new dimensionality reduction model for 2D image matrices: unsupervised 2D dimensionality reduction with adaptive structure learning (DRASL). Instead of using a predetermined similarity matrix to characterize the underlying geometry structure of the original 2D image space, our proposed approach involves the learning of a similarity matrix in the procedure of dimensionality reduction. To realize a desirable neighbors assignment after dimensionality reduction, we add a constraint to our model such that there are exact connected components in the final subspace. To accomplish these goals, we propose a unified objective function to integrate dimensionality reduction, the learning of the similarity matrix, and the adaptive learning of neighbors assignment into it. An iterative optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the objective function. We compare the proposed method with several 2D unsupervised dimensionality methods. K-means is used to evaluate the clustering performance. We conduct extensive experiments on Coil20, AT&T, FERET, USPS, and Yale data sets to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
The Archaeology of the Kelp Industry in the Northern Islands of Ireland

The manufacture of kelp in Ireland from the 17th to early 20th centuries provided soda and later iodine for contemporary industries. It was an immensely important element of coastal economies, and notably for island communities, often impoverished and with limited agricultural means. This paper traces the origins and development of the industry in Ireland and examines the evidence for production in the islands off the northern coast. The results of a recent survey of surviving kelp monuments are presented. The form of the monuments, in particular kilns, is considered as well as the role of the industry in island economies. © 2006 The Author
A REVERSE MICROEMULSION POLYMERIZATION METHOD FOR PREPARATION OF BIOADHESIVE POLYACRYLIC ACID NANOPARTICLES FOR MUCOSAL DRUG DELIVERY: LOADING AND RELEASE OF TIMOLOL MALEATE

Polyacrylic acid nanoparticles were successfully synthesized using a reverse microemulsion polymerization process. They had a narrow size range, averaging ∼50 nm, and were stable in buffer. The particles were isolated and lyophilized in dry powder form, and were redispersible as individual particles in buffer. The drug timolol maleate was loaded into the nanoparticles from aqueous drug solutions and, when the drug-loaded particles were dispersed in a phosphate buffer solution, the drug slowly released over several hours from the nanoparticles.
Power minimization for clustered routing in network on chip architectures

Traditional System-on-Chip (SoC) design employs shared buses for data transfer among various subsystems. As SoC becomes more complex involving a larger number of subsystems, traditional bus-based architecture is giving way to a new paradigm for on-chip communication. A communication network of point-to-point links and routing switches is used to facilitate communication between the subsystems. The considerations that have driven data communication from shared buses to packet-switching networks in clustered architectures (spatial reuse, multi-hop routing, flow and congestion control, and standard interfaces for design reuse, etc.) will inevitably drive VLSI designers to use these principles in on-chip interconnects.
Influence of light, temperature and salinity on dissolved organic carbon exudation rates in Zostera marina L

Background: Marine angiosperms, seagrasses, are sentinel species of marine ecosystem health and function. Seagrass carbon budgets provide insight on the minimum requirements needed to maintain this valuable resource. Carbon budgets are a balance between C fixation, growth, storage and loss rates, most of which are well characterized. However, relatively few measurements of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leaf exudation or rhizodeposition rates exist for most seagrass species. Here I evaluate how eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) DOC exudation is affected by a single factor manipulation (light, temperature or salinity). Eelgrass plants were hydroponically exposed to treatments in experimental chambers (separate leaf and rhizome/root compartments) with artificial seawater medium. Regression analysis of changes in the DOC concentration through time was used to calculate DOC exudation rates. Results: Exudation rates were similar across all treatments in all experiments. For all experiments, pooled leaf DOC exudation ranged between 0.032 and 0.069 mg C gdw h, while rhizodeposition ranged between 0.024 and 0.045 mg C gdw h. These rates are consistent with previously published values and provide first-order estimates for mechanistic models. Conclusions: Zostera marina carbon losses from either leaf exudation or rhizodeposition account for a small proportion of gross primary production (1.2-4.6%) and appear to be insensitive to short-term (e.g., hours to days) environmental variations in chamber experiments. Based on these preliminary experiments, I suggest that Z. marina DOC exudation may be a passive process and not an active transport process.
Numts: an impediment to DNA barcoding of Polyclinids, Tunicata

Abstract The mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, a widely accepted molecular marker for species identification and classification, has been questioned because of the presence of Numts. In this study we found the presence of Numts in the COI chromatogram of two tunicates, Polyclinum indicum and Polyclinum madrasensis belonging to the genus Polyclinum. Numts were also present in our sequence (Accession Number: KJ944391) and in other sequences belonging to genus Polyclinum in the GenBank record. The GeneBank database of genus Polyclinum contains COI-like sequences and COI pseudogenes, but no record of COI gene from Polyclinids. The prevalence of Numts in Polyclinids belonging to Tunicata, is an impediment to DNA barcoding studies of Polyclinum species.
Effect of Benchmarking of Performance Measurement System on low-cost advantage, and Performance-A Conceptual Paper

The performance measurement system (PMS) developed as strategic orientation aimed at providing information to enhance the organization’s strategic outcomes. PMS provides benchmarking information in order to compare its competitive parcel of products and services against its competitors. Benchmarking information is related to trend in performance of the firm during previous years, and its explanation, and comparing firm’s performance with similar firm’s performance in industry. Moreover, inherited by the scarcity of empirical studies, evidence had been exploratory and little is known about organization’s performance measurement system and its effects on strategic outcomes. The impact of benchmarking information of PMS on the financial performance is sparse significantly. On another hand, in terms of essential benchmarking information of PMS, that might help to explain how the system has beneficial direct effects on organizational outcomes and indirect through the low-cost advantage. Thus, based on in-depth review on existing literature on benchmarking information of PMS, this paper develops a proposed theoretical framework. Specifically, the objectives of this paper are three folds; Firstly, it attempts to unravel the various perspectives and define benchmarking information of PMS and suggest on how it could be further developed. Secondly, benchmarking information of PMS helps the organizations to gain low-cost advantage possible and to improve the performance.