Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved immunogenicity of Newcastle disease virus inactivated vaccine following DNA vaccination using Newcastle disease virus hemagglutinin-neuraminidase and fusion protein genes

The present study describes the development of DNA vaccines using the hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) and fusion (F) genes from AF2240 Newcastle disease virus strain, namely pIRES/HN, pIRES/F and pIRES-F/HN. Transient expression analysis of the constructs in Vero cells revealed the successful expression of gene inserts in vitro. Moreover, in vivo experiments showed that single vaccination with the constructed plasmid DNA (pDNA) followed by a boost with inactivated vaccine induced a significant difference in enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay antibody levels (p < 0.05) elicited by either pIRES/F, pIRES/F+ pIRES/HN or pIRES-F/HN at one week after the booster in specific pathogen free chickens when compared with the inactivated vaccine alone. Taken together, these results indicated that recombinant pDNA could be used to increase the efficacy of the inactivated vaccine immunization procedure.
A Tree-based Method of Web Service Composition

One of the most promising ideas underlying Web services is service composition, that is, to provide new value added services by combining some pre-existing Web services. Although though service composition has received a great deal of attention tention and there are many solutions to the problem of composition, finding potential service compositions efficiently is still challenging because of the fact that the number of candidate services can be very large. In this paper, a tree-based method of Web service composition is proposed, by which all potential candidate composite services that meet the user's request can be created. Moreover, these composite services are ordered according to the QoS attribute concerned by the user, so the user can find the best and arbitrary top-n composite services.
Historical Persecution Reaction Complex

This original study examines the reluctance of oppressed populations to publicly criticize the recognized performance shortcomings of leaders who are members of their identity group. Using critical race theory (CRT), this article utilizes three case examples of Black American leadership that present evidence of what the authors identify as Historical Persecution Reaction Complex (HPRC). HPRC describes four elemental arguments reflecting an oppressed identity group’s attempt to protect itself from perceived further social marginalization, limit the exacerbation of oppression, and to preserve the identity group’s leadership gains in the larger society by supporting leadership despite recognized shortcomings in the leadership. Although asserting HPRC operates as a functional reaction to oppression by serving both as an act of cohesion and resistance to oppressive structures, the authors suggest that HPRC is paradoxically detrimental to oppressed identity groups due to maintaining substandard leadership.
AIS Electronic

Habit has been investigated as an antecedent of the information systems usage in a few literatures recent years. But little effort has been found on the determinants of habit itself in the information systems research. Drawing upon the insights from goal-directed behavior, habit/automaticity perspective, and IS continuance model, this paper proposes a research model for understanding the antecedents of the individual information technology usage habit. This study suggest that individual satisfaction, perceived enjoyment and user experience positively influence the strength of usage habit, and that perceived usefulness, confirmation of expectation and perceived enjoyment positively affect satisfaction. The implications are discussed, and contributions of this study are presented.
Area and performance optimizations in path-based scheduling

The authors describe the area and performance optimizations implemented in the As-Fast-As-Possible (AFAP) scheduling algorithm. The AFAP scheduling algorithm is a path-based technique that finds the minimum number of control steps for all possible sequences of operations in the control-flow graph, under given constraints. Area requirements for functional units, such as their number and type, are translated into constraints which are then met exactly. The number of registers is also minimized. The performance optimizations included in this paper are concerned mainly with the scheduling of loops. <<ETX>>
Design of codebook using Centroid Neural Network with state dependence measure

A codebook design method for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) by using a Centroid Neural Network (CNN) is applied to a Korean monophone recognition problem in this paper. In order to alleviate the accuracy degradation problem in tied mixture HMM (TMHMM), this paper utilizes a clustering algorithm, called Centroid Neural Network with State Dependence measure (CNN(SD)), for TMHMMs. The CNN(SD) uses a novel distance measure that discriminates between two observation densities in the HMM from the same state and those from different states. When compared with other conventional unsupervised neural networks, the CNN(SD) successfully allocates more code vectors to the regions where Gaussian Probability Density Function (GPDF) data of different states overlap each other while it allocates fewer code vectors to the regions where GPDF data are from the same states. Experiments and results on a Korean monophone data, the CNN(SD) shows improvements on the recognition accuracy over CNN and the traditional k-means algorithm.
Do clicks measure recommendation relevancy?: an empirical user study

Evaluation have been an important subject since the early days of recommender systems. In online test, the click-through rate (CTR) is often adopted as the metric. However, recommended items with higher CTR does not imply higher relevance of two items since factors like item popularity or item serendipity may influence user's click behavior. We argue that the relevance of recommendation system is also desirable in many real applications. Here relevant means relevance in a human perceptible way. Relevant recommendations not only increase the users' trust to the system but are extremely useful for the vast number of anonymous user as their recommendations may only be made based on the current item. In this paper, we empirically examine the relation between the relevance of recommendations and the corresponding CTR with a few representative ItemCF algorithms through online data from a TV show/movie website, Hulu. Experiments show that algorithms with higher overall CTR may not correspond to higher relevance. Thus CTR may not be the optimal metric for online evaluation of recommender systems if producing relevant recommendations is of importance.
Rapid-Response Splicing Reporter Screens Identify Differential Regulators of Constitutive and Alternative Splicing

ABSTRACT Bioactive compounds have been invaluable for dissecting the mechanisms, regulation, and functions of cellular processes. However, very few such reagents have been described for pre-mRNA splicing. To facilitate their systematic discovery, we developed a high-throughput cell-based assay that measures pre-mRNA splicing by utilizing a quantitative reporter system with advantageous features. The reporter, consisting of a destabilized, intron-containing luciferase expressed from a short-lived mRNA, allows rapid screens (<4 h), thereby obviating the potential toxicity of splicing inhibitors. We describe three inhibitors (out of >23,000 screened), all pharmacologically active: clotrimazole, flunarizine, and chlorhexidine. Interestingly, none was a general splicing inhibitor. Rather, each caused distinct splicing changes of numerous genes. We further discovered the target of action of chlorhexidine and show that it is a selective inhibitor of specific Cdc2-like kinases (Clks) that phosphorylate serine-arginine-rich (SR) protein splicing factors. Our findings reveal unexpected activities of clinically used drugs in splicing and uncover differential regulation of constitutively spliced introns.
SentiVoice - a system for querying hotel service reviews via phone

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is a new research field but playing an important role in computer sciences, attracting interests of academia as well as industry. As a field of research, it is closely related to natural language processing, machine learning, text mining and information retrieval. In this paper, we use the machine learning approach to classify hotel service reviews. The results of this phase are integrated into our voice server system that we have successfully developed previously ([31], [32]). As a result, users can consult hotel information via phone calls instead of the keyboard.
Evaluating the Energy Consumption of RFID Tag Collision Resolution Protocols

RFID technology is regarded as a bridge between the physical object world and the virtual digital space. In recent years, RFID system is pervading our daily life. In the RFID system, energy consumed by the reader and tags during tag identifier collection is becoming a key issue that affects the performance of the system, especially for the mobile RFID systems. In this paper, the energy consumed by both the reader and tag in resolving the collisions caused by that multiple tags try to transmit their identifiers simultaneously through the air interface is examined. The commonly used RFID tag collision resolution protocols include the frame slotted ALOHA based class 0 and 1 protocols, the binary query tree based protocols, are evaluated regarding to the performance metrics of energy consumption, and some usefully conclusion are drawn based on the evaluation.
Recursive Histogram Modification: Establishing Equivalency Between Reversible Data Hiding and Lossless Data Compression

State-of-the-art schemes for reversible data hiding (RDH) usually consist of two steps: first construct a host sequence with a sharp histogram via prediction errors, and then embed messages by modifying the histogram with methods, such as difference expansion and histogram shift. In this paper, we focus on the second stage, and propose a histogram modification method for RDH, which embeds the message by recursively utilizing the decompression and compression processes of an entropy coder. We prove that, for independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) gray-scale host signals, the proposed method asymptotically approaches the rate-distortion bound of RDH as long as perfect compression can be realized, i.e., the entropy coder can approach entropy. Therefore, this method establishes the equivalency between reversible data hiding and lossless data compression. Experiments show that this coding method can be used to improve the performance of previous RDH schemes and the improvements are more significant for larger images.
Like a Chameleon: A Beginning Teacher’s Journey to Implement Active Learning

Abstract The purpose of this study was to follow the learning trajectory of a beginning teacher attempting to implement active learning instructional methods in a middle grades classroom. The study utilized a qualitative case study methodological approach with the researcher in the role of participant observer. Three research questions were explored: the challenges the teacher faced, the supports that enabled the teacher to implement active learning, and the students’ response to active learning instructional approaches. Data collection occurred over nine months and included teacher interviews, videos of lessons, a researcher log, and student questionnaires. Data analysis revealed the importance of modeling, supportive mentors, management strategies, reflection, and resources for novice teachers to experience success in the implementation of active learning.
Dr. Formlens, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Monoidal Functors

To make data available on the Web, one must typically implement two components: one to convert the data into HTML, and another to parse updates out of client responses. In current systems, these components are usually implemented using separate functions— an approach that replicates functionality across multiple pieces of code, making programs difficult to write, reason about, and maintain. This paper presents formlenses, a new abstraction based on formlets that makes it easy to bridge the gap between data stored on a server and values embedded into an HTML form. We present a new foundation for formlets based on monoidal functors (replacing the classic definition based on applicative functors), and show how to endow the resulting structures with a bidirectional semantics. We investigate the connection between linearity and bidirectional transformations and develop a translation from a linear pattern syntax into formlens combinators. Finally, we develop infrastructure for building formlenses over arbitrary algebraic datatypes.
TWIST-1 promotes cell growth, drug resistance and progenitor clonogenic capacities in myeloid leukemia and is a novel poor prognostic factor in acute myeloid leukemia

Alterations of TWIST-1 expression are often seen in solid tumors and contribute to tumorigenesis and cancer progression. However, studies concerning its pathogenic role in leukemia are scarce. Our study shows that TWIST-1 is overexpressed in bone marrow mononuclear cells of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Gain-of-function and loss-of-function analyses demonstrate that TWIST-1 promotes cell growth, colony formation and drug resistance of AML and CML cell lines. Furthermore, TWIST-1 is aberrantly highly expressed in CD34+CD38− leukemia stem cell candidates and its expression declines with differentiation. Down-modulation of TWIST-1 in myeloid leukemia CD34+ cells impairs their colony-forming capacity. Mechanistically, c-MPL, which is highly expressed in myeloid leukemia cells and associated with poor prognosis, is identified as a TWIST-1 coexpressed gene in myeloid leukemia patients and partially contributes to TWIST-1-mediated leukemogenic effects. Moreover, patients with higher TWIST-1 expression have shorter overall and event-free survival (OS and EFS) in AML. Multivariate analysis further demonstrates that TWIST-1 overexpression is a novel independent unfavourable predictor for both OS and EFS in AML. These data highlight TWIST-1 as a new candidate gene contributing to leukemogenesis of myeloid leukemia, and propose possible new avenues for improving risk and treatment stratification in AML.
The Ages of Dwarf Elliptical Galaxies

We present narrowband photometry of 91 dwarf elliptical galaxies in the Coma and Fornax Clusters taken with the Strömgren (uvby) filter system. Dividing the sample by dwarf morphology into nucleated (dEN) and nonnucleated (dE) dwarfs reveals two distinct populations of early-type systems based on integrated colors. The class of dEN galaxies are redder in their continuum colors as compared to bright cluster ellipticals and dE type dwarfs, and their position in multicolor diagrams can only be explained by an older mean age for their underlying stellar populations. By comparison with the narrowband photometry of the M87 globular cluster system, we find that dEN's are a higher metallicity continuation of the old, metal-poor color sequence of galactic globular clusters and the blue population of M87 globular clusters. Bright ellipticals and dE dwarfs, on the other hand, follow the color sequence of the metal-rich, red population of M87 globular clusters. A comparison to SED models, convolved to a simple metallicity model, finds that dEN's and blue globular clusters are 3 to 4 Gyr older than cluster ellipticals and 5 Gyr older than dE type galaxies. The implication is that globular clusters and dEN galaxies are primordial and have metallicities set by external constraints such as the enrichment of their formation clouds. Bright ellipticals and dE galaxies have metallicities and ages that suggest an extended phase of initial star formation that produces a younger mean age, even if their formation epoch is similar to that of dEN's and blue globular clusters, and an internally driven chemical evolutionary history.
Sleep–Wake Cycle in Rural Populations

The light/dark cycle is the main zeitgeber acting on the mammalian circadian system; nevertheless, distinct environments, such as those with and without electricity may provoke important resetting effects on the clock. The aim of this study was to describe sleep/wake patterns of adolescents living in two Brazilian rural regions. In the first population, 120 adolescents participated in the study, 35 of whom did not have electricity at home. They filled out a questionnaire which included questions concerning their sleep habits. It was found that electricity at home influenced sleep patterns. Adolescents with electricity at home had later wake-up times on school days (p < 0.05) and on weekends (p < 0.05), and tendencies towards later bedtimes on school days (0.05 < p < 0.10) and weekends (0.05 < p < 0.10). In the second population, 461 adolescents filled out the same questionnaire, 66 of whom did not have television at home. ANOVA showed that having TV at home was related to later bedtimes during school days (p < 0.05) and weekends (p < 0.05). These results support the idea that sleep patterns are influenced by technological advances.
Human Cytomegalovirus Protein Kinase UL97 Forms a Complex with the Tegument Phosphoprotein pp65

ABSTRACT UL97 is a protein kinase encoded by human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) and is an important target for antiviral drugs against this ubiquitous herpesvirus, which is a major cause of life-threatening opportunistic infections in the immunocompromised host. In an effort to better understand the function(s) of UL97 during HCMV replication, a recombinant HCMV, NTAP97, which expresses a tandem affinity purification (TAP) tag at the amino terminus of UL97, was used to obtain UL97 protein complexes from infected cells. pp65 (also known as UL83), the 65-kDa virion tegument phosphoprotein, specifically copurified with UL97 during TAP, as shown by mass spectrometry and Western blot analyses. Reciprocal coimmunoprecipitation experiments using lysates of infected cells also indicated an interaction between UL97 and pp65. Moreover, in a glutathione S-transferase (GST) pull-down experiment, purified GST-pp65 fusion protein specifically bound in vitro-translated UL97, suggesting that UL97 and pp65 do not require other viral proteins to form a complex and may directly interact. Notably, pp65 has been previously reported to form unusual aggregates during viral replication when UL97 is pharmacologically inhibited or genetically ablated, and a pp65 deletion mutant was observed to exhibit modest resistance to a UL97 inhibitor (M. N. Prichard, W. J. Britt, S. L. Daily, C. B. Hartline, and E. R. Kern, J. Virol. 79:15494-15502, 2005). A stable protein-protein interaction between pp65 and UL97 may be relevant to incorporation of these proteins into HCMV particles during virion morphogenesis, with potential implications for immunomodulation by HCMV, and may also be a mechanism by which UL97 is negatively regulated during HCMV replication.
Fast Background Subtraction Using Improved GMM and Graph Cut

Background Subtraction is widely used to detect moving object from static background. In order to get good performance for practical application systems, the background subtraction method should not be too time and space consuming, and the accuracy is also required. Gaussian Mixture Model is a robust background subtraction method and has been widely used since it is proposed. Graph cut is a new algorithm developed to solve energy minimization problem and can be used to extract foreground object by constructing some appropriate energy functions. In this paper, an improved Gaussian Mixture Model is proposed to save time and space. And a new energy function is constructed for the graph cut. Space sampling is used to further accelerate the processing speed, so that it can be used in real-time applications. Shadow eliminating and noise removing method are also used to further improve the performance of the system. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our method.
History-aware, resource-based dynamic scheduling for heterogeneous multi-core processors

The authors introduce a history-aware, resource-based dynamic (or simply HARD) scheduler for heterogeneous chip multi-processors (CMPs). HARD relies on recording application resource utilisation and throughput to adaptively change cores for applications during runtime. The authors show that HARD can be configured to achieve both performance and power improvements and compare HARD to an alternative dynamic scheduler and a static scheduler to provide better understanding.
Existence of c-Kit negative cells with ultrastructural features of interstitial cells of Cajal in the subserosal layer of the W/Wv mutant mouse colon

Interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) are mesenchymal cells that are distributed along the gastrointestinal tract and function as pacemaker cells or intermediary cells between nerves and smooth muscle cells. ICC express a receptor tyrosine kinase c-Kit, which is an established marker for ICC. The c-kit gene is allelic with the murine white-spotting locus (W), and some ICC subsets were reported to be missing in heterozygous mutant W/Wv mice carrying W and Wv mutated alleles. In this study, the characterization of interstitial cells in the subserosal layer of W/Wv mice was analyzed by immunohistochemistry and electron microscopy. In the proximal and distal colon of W/Wv mutant mice, no c-Kit-positive cells were detected in the subserosal layer by immunohistochemistry. By electron microscopy, the interstitial cells, which were characterized by the existence of caveolae, abundant mitochondria and gap junctions, were observed in the W/Wv mutant colon. The morphological characteristics were comparable to those of the multipolar c-Kit positive ICC seen in the subserosa of proximal and distal colon of wild-type mice. Fibroblasts were also located in the same layers, but the morphology of the fibroblasts was distinguishable from that of ICC in wild type mice or of ICC-like cells in W/Wv mutant mice. Collectively, it is concluded that c-Kit-negative interstitial cells showing a typical ICC ultrastructure exist in the proximal and distal colon of W/Wv mutant mice.
Improvement of Schedulability Analysis with a Priority Share Policy in On-Chip Networks

Priority-based wormhole switching with a priority share policy has been proposed as a possible solution for real-time on-chip communication. However, the blocking introduced by priority share complicates the analysis process. In this paper, we propose a new “per-priority” basis analysis scheme which computes the total time window at each priority level instead of each traffic-flow. By checking the release instance of each flow at the corresponding priority window, we can determine schedulability efficiently.
Multispectral image fusion based on the common vector approach

Multispectral image fusion has attracted much attention in the area of computer vision based image processing for remote sensing, industrial automation, surveillance, medical and defense applications. The process carried out in image fusion is combining useful information stated on different channels related to the same scene. Since the proposed image fusion technique greatly improve the performance of image classification, segmentation and edge detection, a new solution is required to combine multispectral images in order to get more informative and good visualized one as well as preserving the important details behind them. By considering this fact, we have introduced a new image fusion approach based on the Common Vector Approach (CVA) concept. By examining the visual results, one can observe that CVA method presents good results as compared with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).