Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A role for the Myoblast city homologues Dock1 and Dock5 and the adaptor proteins Crk and Crk-like in zebrafish myoblast fusion

Myoblast fusion follows a defined sequence of events that is strikingly similar in vertebrates and invertebrates. Genetic analysis in Drosophila has identified many of the molecules that mediate the different steps in the fusion process; by contrast, the molecular basis of myoblast fusion during vertebrate embryogenesis remains poorly characterised. A key component of the intracellular fusion pathway in Drosophila is the protein encoded by the myoblast city (mbc) gene, a close homologue of the vertebrate protein dedicator of cytokinesis 1 (DOCK1, formerly DOCK180). Using morpholino antisense-oligonucleotide-mediated knockdown of gene activity in the zebrafish embryo, we show that the fusion of embryonic fast-twitch myoblasts requires the activities of Dock1 and the closely related Dock5 protein. In addition, we show that the adaptor proteins Crk and Crk-like (Crkl), with which Dock proteins are known to interact physically, are also required for myoblast fusion.
Hybrid structured buck converter with ripple cancellation and improved efficiency

Design of a ripple free switching mode power converter is a challenging task in power electronics industry. The conventional method for ripple reduction is to use passive filters, which makes the system bulky. Hybrid structured converters are introduced to reduce the ripple without using bulky output capacitors. In this type of converters, to cancel the ripple, opposite current / voltage of the ripple is injected to the output of converter. However the efficiency of the hybrid structure is poor due to the series resistor used for current sensing. This paper proposes a modified hybrid structure converter with improved efficiency as well as desirable ripple performance. The proposed circuit uses DCR current sensing method and reduces the losses. The modified structure gives 4.14 percent efficiency improvement at a load current of 2A compare to conventional hybrid converter. The ripple voltage is just 3mV even without output capacitor.
Efficient Feedback Collection for Pay-as-you-go Source Selection

Technical developments, such as the web of data and web data extraction, combined with policy developments such as those relating to open government or open science, are leading to the availability of increasing numbers of data sources. Indeed, given these physical sources, it is then also possible to create further virtual sources that integrate, aggregate or summarise the data from the original sources. As a result, there is a plethora of data sources, from which a small subset may be able to provide the information required to support a task. The number and rate of change in the available sources is likely to make manual source selection and curation by experts impractical for many applications, leading to the need to pursue a pay-as-you-go approach, in which crowds or data consumers annotate results based on their correctness or suitability, with the resulting annotations used to inform, e.g., source selection algorithms. However, for pay-as-you-go feedback collection to be cost-effective, it may be necessary to select judiciously the data items on which feedback is to be obtained. This paper describes OLBP (Ordering and Labelling By Precision), a heuristics-based approach to the targeting of data items for feedback to support mapping and source selection tasks, where users express their preferences in terms of the trade-off between precision and recall. The proposed approach is then evaluated on two different scenarios, mapping selection with synthetic data, and source selection with real data produced by web data extraction. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the amount of feedback required to reach user-provided objectives when using OLBP.
Modeling of Reusability of Procedure based Software Components using Naive Bayes Classifier Approach

We have developed a highly flexible module to evaluate and access the reusability of software components. The purpose of this model is to do pattern recognition by discovering supervised features which can help us to measure the intangible aspects of software components in terms of reusability. There were several function based applications which were given due diligence for identifying their various degrees of reusability of their components. Once these projects were analyzed their software components were measured in terms of software metrics including (Volume, Coupling, Complexity, Reuse frequency, Regularity and Reusability). These measured metrics were carefully allocated a particular set of label which was based on the principals of software engineering and objectives to be achieved for doing the due research. Therefore, in this research work we are studying the degree of reusability by using six classes Naive Bayes Classification method which was able to give high precision value as compare to previous methods.
Dissolved Organic Nitrogen Hydrolysis Rates in Axenic Cultures of Aureococcus anophagefferens (Pelagophyceae): Comparison with Heterotrophic Bacteria

ABSTRACT The marine autotroph Aureococcus anophagefferens (Pelagophyceae) was rendered axenic in order to investigate hydrolysis rates of peptides, chitobiose, acetamide, and urea as indicators of the ability to support growth on dissolved organic nitrogen. Specific rates of hydrolysis varied between 8 and 700% of rates observed in associated heterotrophic marine bacteria.
Cluster-Based Mobility Supporting WMN for IoT Networks

IoT (Internet of Things) network has recently emerged as a promising technology for various fields. To realize IoT service, access points are needed for heterogeneous terminals, sensors, actuators, laptop and mobile terminal. Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) could be a good solution. WMN consists of mesh points (MPs) that serve as a relay for other MPs for extension of network coverage. Reliable service coverage is given for network users who suffer from lack of wired infrastructure. WMN has self-recovery scheme, so it gives reliability and cost-effective. Most researches about WMN consider MPs without mobility. However, mobile MPs could give flexibility to IoT network. In this paper, MPs have mobility for flexible IoT services. It is considered that terminals which have same characteristics form a cluster and mobile MP gives access to those terminals. However, mobility of MPs degrade performance of network, packet success ratio, delay and jitter. Especially, frequent link breakages and extended hidden nodes problem occur. In this paper, Group mobility based clustering and multi-channel MAC schemes are used to overcome results of mobility. Moreover, cluster-based multi-channel framework is suggested for reliable wireless communication for IoT services.
Kidney Shear Wave Speed Values in Subjects with and without Renal Pathology and Inter-Operator Reproducibility of Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse Elastography (ARFI) - Preliminary Results

Aim to assess the inter-operator reproducibility of kidney shear wave speed, evaluated by means of Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) elastography, and the factors which influence it. Methods Our prospective pilot study included 107 subjects with or without kidney pathology in which kidney shear wave speed was evaluated by means of ARFI elastography. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to assess ARFI elastography reproducibility. Results A strong agreement was obtained between kidney shear wave speed measurements obtained by the two operators: ICC = 0.71 (right kidney) and 0.69 (left kidney). Smaller ICCs were obtained in “healthy subjects”, as compared to patients with kidney diseases (0.68 vs. 0.75), in women as compared with men (0.59 vs. 0.78), in subjects younger than 50 years as compared with those aged at least 50 years (0.63 vs. 0.71), in obese as compared with normal weight and overweight subjects (0.36 vs. 0.66 and 0.78) and in case of measurements depth <4 cm or >6 cm as compared with those performed at a depth of 4–6 cm from the skin (0.32 and 0.60 vs. 0.81). Conclusion ARFI elastography is a reproducible method for kidney shear wave speed assessment.
Enterococcus faecalis Localization in Experimental Endophthalmitis: Role of Plasmid-Encoded Aggregation Substance

ABSTRACT Enterococci have emerged as leading agents of nosocomial infection, yet relatively little is known about the pathogenesis of enterococcal disease. In previous studies, we developed an Enterococcus faecalis endophthalmitis infection model which provides unique opportunities to study the evolution of enterococcal disease by direct observation, as well as through sensitive electrophysiologic measures of organ function. The present study was designed to determine whetherE. faecalis possesses traits that permit its attachment to mammalian tissues during infection. It was also of interest to determine whether a plasmid-encoded adhesin, aggregation substance, contributes to enterococcal localization or otherwise mediates adherence to alternate sites. These studies found that, in this model, enterococci attach to membranous structures occurring within the vitreous but that this attachment or the course or severity of disease is unaffected by the aggregation substance phenotype.
Voice conversion based on Non-negative Matrix Factorization in noisy environments

This paper presents a voice conversion (VC) technique for noisy environments. We prepared parallel exemplars (dictionary) that consist of the source and target exemplars, which have the same texts uttered by the source and target speakers. The input source signal is decomposed into the source exemplars, noise exemplars obtained from the input signal, and their weights (activities). Then, the converted signal is obtained by calculating the linear combination of the target exemplars and the weights which are calculated using the source exemplars. In the proposed method, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) -based conversion method is also applied to the feature vectors generated by the sparse coding in order to compensate a mismatch between the weights of source and target exemplars. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed by comparing its effectiveness with that of a conventional method.
Evolved responses to an uncertain world

1\. Title page and table of contents 2\. Chapter 1: Introduction 1 3\. Chapter 2: Beyond a trait view of risk-taking 6 4\. Chapter 3: Is risk-taking used as a cue in mate choice? 28 5\. Chapter 4: Simple rules for human foraging 56 6\. Summary 104 7\. References 107 8\. Appendix 117 9\. German summary and statement 125
A Novel Architectural Pattern to Support the Development of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Systems Integrating Haptic Interfaces and Gesture Recognition Algorithms

Haptic and robotic interfaces are recently gaining momentum to be pervasively integrated in modern everyday life. In fact, they can be employed in several different fields, ranging from manipulation of small and dangerous objects to rehabilitation, assistive and service technologies, and are also integrated in mission critical systems. Modern research is rapidly shifting to investigate novel and more intuitive ways of controlling these interfaces. In particular, gesture-based control is one of the most interesting scenario for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), since we human perceive gestures as a natural way of interaction with the external world. In this work we present a novel architectural pattern, entirely based on the Robotic Operating System (ROS), to support the development of applications and systems where computer vision techniques are applied to control robotic interfaces. As case study, the presented pattern is used to develop and assess the overall PARLOMA system. PARLOMA project aims at developing a system to enable remote communication between deaf-blind subjects. The system is designed to send, remotely and in real-time, messages in tactile Sign Language from a sender to a deaf-blind recipient (or many recipients) by integrating hand tracking and gesture recognition algorithms coupled with bio-mimetic haptic interfaces.
Orchestrating ATL Model Transformations

The design and development of any complex applications using a Model-driven Engineering approach involve not only the use of many models, but also the use of many model transformations between them. These transformations should be chained together, using Model Transformation Orchestration notations and tools. This paper introduces Wires*, a graphical executable language for the orchestration of ATL transformations, which provides appropriate mechanisms to enable the modular and compositional specification and execution of complex model transformations chains.
Picture Books and the Digital World

The book publishing industry in general and picture book materials for children in particular have undergone rapid and profound changes in recent years with the developments in the digital realm. As a result, teachers, school librarians, and literacy researchers have been largely left to their own devices to figure out basic questions related to e-picture books such as what works, what doesn't, what's good, and so what? This article discusses two fundamental issues related to these materials and young children's interactions with them: (1) Print or Digital—which version of a story should teachers use in particular instances and (2) Quality of Features of Digital Picture Books—evaluation and selection factors that should be considered in assessing digital picture books for use in the classroom.
Choices and destinations at transfer to secondary schools in London

It has been argued that the recent parental choice reforms in the UK favour middle‐class families. The paper reports quantitative and qualitative research evidence drawn from a recent ESRC‐funded study. In this study, middle‐class children were neither significantly more likely to be offered a place at their family's first‐choice school nor to be offered more places per application made. It is argued that routes through the education system have to be understood both in terms of patterns of applications and selection by schools. Various familial preferences are examined according to the child's sex, whether the child attends a private primary school, whether the child's primary school is affiliated to the Roman Catholic church, the ethnic background of the family and the family's social class. It is reported that middle‐class families prefer selective and higher scoring (in terms of performance league tables) schools. We examine why middle‐class families tend to use higher scoring schools. It is suggested.
Machine translation from Japanese and French to Vietnamese, the difference among language families

Although Vietnamese is spoken language of more than 90 million people in the world (in 2014), Vietnamese language is still considered as a low-resourced language. Vietnamese NLP still lacks of resources for text and speech processing, especially research on machine translation for Vietnamese is very rare. This paper presents our first attempt to collect and construct French-Vietnamese and Japanese-Vietnamese statistical machine translation systems. These two different languages, French and Japanese, are less focused in Vietnamese-related machine translation research. The differences between these two languages in comparison with Vietnamese can bring out interesting observations.
Tidal marsh plant responses to elevated CO2, nitrogen fertilization, and sea level rise

Elevated CO2 and nitrogen (N) addition directly affect plant productivity and the mechanisms that allow tidal marshes to maintain a constant elevation relative to sea level, but it remains unknown how these global change drivers modify marsh plant response to sea level rise. Here we manipulated factorial combinations of CO2 concentration (two levels), N availability (two levels) and relative sea level (six levels) using in situ mesocosms containing a tidal marsh community composed of a sedge, Schoenoplectus americanus, and a grass, Spartina patens. Our objective is to determine, if elevated CO2 and N alter the growth and persistence of these plants in coastal ecosystems facing rising sea levels. After two growing seasons, we found that N addition enhanced plant growth particularly at sea levels where plants were most stressed by flooding (114% stimulation in the + 10 cm treatment), and N effects were generally larger in combination with elevated CO2 (288% stimulation). N fertilization shifted the optimal productivity of S. patens to a higher sea level, but did not confer S. patens an enhanced ability to tolerate sea level rise. S. americanus responded strongly to N only in the higher sea level treatments that excluded S. patens. Interestingly, addition of N, which has been suggested to accelerate marsh loss, may afford some marsh plants, such as the widespread sedge, S. americanus, the enhanced ability to tolerate inundation. However, if chronic N pollution reduces the availability of propagules of S. americanus or other flood‐tolerant species on the landscape scale, this shift in species dominance could render tidal marshes more susceptible to marsh collapse.
Nonlinear model predictive control for wheeled mobile robot in dynamic environment

This paper address the set-point regulation problem of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot with obstacle avoidance in a known dynamic environment populated with static and moving obstacles subject to robot kinematic and dynamic constraints by using the nonlinear model predictive control in polar coordinate. The terminal state penalty, terminal state constraints, and the input saturation constraints are taken into consideration in this optimization problem to guarantee the closed-loop regulation performance and stability. Simulation results are shown for illustrating the effectiveness of the control algorithm in steering a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot.
Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics: Developing a New Field of Inquiry

The principal aim of this investigation was to help develop ‘Interdisciplinary Studies of Childhood Ethics’ as a new field of inquiry. We identified: (i) current intra-disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge gaps in childhood ethics; and (ii) priorities for future research and development. A prominent problem, highlighted within and across disciplines, relates to how the best interests standard should be reconciled with the recognition of children as agents. This project makes an innovative contribution by promoting the development of interdisciplinary childhood ethics knowledge and standards, informing future improvements in childhood research and services.
Microbial diversity in shallow‐water hydrothermal sediments of Kueishan Island, Taiwan as revealed by pyrosequencing

Kueishan Island is a young volcanic island in the southernmost edge of the Okinawa Trough in the northeastern part of Taiwan. A cluster of hydrothermal vents is located off the southeastern tip of the Island at water depths between 10 and 80 m. This paper presents the results of the first study on the microbial communities in bottom sediments collected from the shallow‐water hydrothermal vents of Kueishan Island. Small‐subunit ribosomal RNA gene‐based high‐throughput 454 pyrosequencing was used to characterize the assemblages of bacteria, archaea, and small eukaryotes in sediment samples collected at various distances from the hydrothermal vents. Sediment from the vent area contained the highest diversity of archaea and the lowest diversity of bacteria and small eukaryotes. Epsilonproteobacteria were the most abundant group in the vent sediment, but their abundance decreased with increasing distance from the vent area. Most Epsilonproteobacteria belonged to the mesophilic chemolithoautotrophic genera Sulfurovum and Sulfurimonas. Recent reports on these two genera have come from deep‐sea hydrothermal vents. Conversely, the relative contribution of Gammaproteobacteria to the bacterial community increased with increasing distance from the vent area. Our study revealed the contrasting effects of venting on the benthic bacterial and archaeal communities, and showed that the sediments of the shallow‐waters hydrothermal vents were dominated by chemoautotrophic bacteria. The present work broadens our knowledge on microbial diversity in shallow‐water hydrothermal vent habitats.
Optimizing unified loss for web ranking specialization

In this paper, we proposed a novel divide-and-conquer approach to optimize the overall relevance in an unified framework for query clustering and query-based ranking. In our model, latent topics and specialized ranking models are learned iteratively so that an unified objective function, which lower-bounds the conditional probability of observed grades annotated by human editors on training data, is maximized. We conducted experiments comparing the proposed method with several baseline approaches on two data-sets. Experimental results illustrate that our method can significantly improve the ranking relevance over these baselines
The Synchronization of the Human Cortical Working Memory Network

A verbal reasoning problem at the intersection of verbal working memory, problem-solving, and language comprehension was examined using event-related fMRI to distinguish differences in the differential timing of the response of the various cortical regions that compose the working memory network. Problems were developed such that the process demand as well as the timing of the manipulation of the contents of working memory (i.e., a demanding computation) was varied. Activation was observed in several regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the parietal lobe. Examination of the MR amplitude response revealed that the regions do not all activate simultaneously; instead, their activation time courses reveal differential responses that correspond to their theoretical processing role in the problem-solving task. The coordination of cortical area responses reveals how the various cortical regions synchronize and collaborate in order to accomplish a given cognitive function.
Self-Adaptive SLA-Driven Capacity Management for Internet Services

This work considers the problem of hosting multiple third-party Internet services in a cost-effective manner so as to maximize a provider's business objective. For this purpose, we present a dynamic capacity management framework based on an optimization model, which links a cost model based on SLA contracts with an analytical queuing-based performance model, in an attempt to adapt the platform to changing capacity needs in real time. In addition, we propose a two-level SLA specification for different operation modes, namely, normal and surge, which allows for per-use service accounting with respect to requirements of throughput and tail distribution response time. The cost model proposed is based on penalties, incurred by the provider due to SLA violation, and rewards, received when the service level expectations are exceeded. Finally, we evaluate approximations for predicting the performance of the hosted services under two different scheduling disciplines, namely FCFS and processor sharing. Through simulation, we assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as the level of accuracy resulting from the performance model approximations
GPU Accelerated Robust-Laser Based Fast Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

This paper presents an OpenCL implementation of a simultaneous localization, mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The general purpose is to accelerate the computing on a modern GPU. We have studied the FastSLAM2.0 algorithm based on a laser SICK as an exteroceptive sensor for an environment perception. Implementation, evaluation results demonstrate that a GPGPU implementation based OpenCL is an efficient way to speed up SLAM algorithms.