Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.
Own Value System, Value Images,and Cigarette Smoking

It has been suggested that smoking among young people results from a need to confirm self-images and thus is more likely to be adopted by those whose self-images are similar to images of smokers. Conversely, nonsmoking is expected to occur among those whose self-images are similar to images of nonsmokers. This study investigates the similarity between value images of smokers and nonsmokers and the terminal and instrumental value systems of junior high school students and recent high school graduates. Overall, the respondents' value systems were considerably more similar to images of nonsmokers than to images of smokers. However, for both age groups, those identified as smokers or potential smokers were more similar to images of smokers than were nonsmokers. Moreover, potential smokers were less similar to images of nonsmokers than were nonsmokers or smokers. Unexpectedly, these latter groups did not differ significantly in their similarity to images of nonsmokers. These results partially replicate previous findings and generally support the hypotheses.
The Adenovirus Type 5 E1B-55K Oncoprotein Actively Shuttles in Virus-Infected Cells, Whereas Transport of E4orf6 Is Mediated by a CRM1-Independent Mechanism

ABSTRACT The E1B-55K and E4orf6 proteins of adenovirus type 5 are involved in viral mRNA export. Here we demonstrate that adenovirus infection does not inhibit the function of the E1B-55K nuclear export signal and that E1B-55K also shuttles in infected cells. Even during virus infection, E1B-55K was exported by the leptomycin B-sensitive CRM1 pathway, whereas E4orf6 transport appeared to be mediated by an alternative mechanism. Our results strengthen the potential role of E1B-55K as the “driving force” for adenoviral late mRNA export.
The Four Cornerstones and Three Pillars in the “House of Russia” Management System

Examines Russian cultural values and discusses their implications for management systems in Russian organizations today. Using Hofstede′s four cultural dimensions, combines the conclusions and observations of the author with literary references and proverbs. Gives valuable insight into Russian mentality and, hence, into how their management systems can be developed in the future.
Considering Transposable Element Diversification in De Novo Annotation Approaches

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile, repetitive DNA sequences that are almost ubiquitous in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. They have a large impact on genome structure, function and evolution. With the recent development of high-throughput sequencing methods, many genome sequences have become available, making possible comparative studies of TE dynamics at an unprecedented scale. Several methods have been proposed for the de novo identification of TEs in sequenced genomes. Most begin with the detection of genomic repeats, but the subsequent steps for defining TE families differ. High-quality TE annotations are available for the Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequences, providing a solid basis for the benchmarking of such methods. We compared the performance of specific algorithms for the clustering of interspersed repeats and found that only a particular combination of algorithms detected TE families with good recovery of the reference sequences. We then applied a new procedure for reconciling the different clustering results and classifying TE sequences. The whole approach was implemented in a pipeline using the REPET package. Finally, we show that our combined approach highlights the dynamics of well defined TE families by making it possible to identify structural variations among their copies. This approach makes it possible to annotate TE families and to study their diversification in a single analysis, improving our understanding of TE dynamics at the whole-genome scale and for diverse species.
School Performance in Childhood and Adolescence as a Predictor of Depressive Symptoms in Adulthood

The current study examined whether school performance in childhood and adolescence predicts depressive symptoms in adulthood over 12 to 21 years. Questionnaires measuring grade point average (GPA), having remedial education or incurring penalties during the current school term were obtained from parents when the participants were aged 9, 12 and 15. Depressive symptoms were selfrated by the participants 12 (n = 971), 17 (n = 990) and 21 (n = 955) years later at ages 21 to 36. The results yielded no systematic associations between indices of school performance and later depressive symptoms across the age cohorts, genders and follow-ups. A lower GPA predicted depressive symptoms in the 12- and 15-year-old girls 12 and/or 17 years later; remedial education predicted depressive symptoms 21 years later in the 9-year-old girls, and 12 and 17 years later in the 9-year-old boys. The results suggest that the association between school performance and depression may not be straightforward and potentially involves other psychological mechanisms.
Pebble Games and Complexity

We study the connection between pebble games and complexity. First, we derive complexity results using pebble games. It is shown that three pebble games used for studying computational complexity are equivalent: namely, the two-person pebble game of Dymond-Tompa, the two-person pebble game of Raz-McKenzie, and the one-person reversible pebble game of Bennett have the same pebble costs over any directed acyclic graph. The three pebble games have been used for studying parallel complexity and for proving lower bounds under restricted settings, and we show one more such lower bound on circuit-depth. Second, the pebble costs are applied to proof complexity. Concerning a family of unsatisfiable CNFs called pebbling contradictions, the pebble cost in any of the pebble games controls the scaling of some parameters of resolution refutations. Namely, the pebble cost controls the minimum depth of resolution refutations and the minimum size of tree-like resolution refutations. Finally, we study the space complexity of computing the pebble costs and of computing the minimum depth of resolution refutations. It is PSPACE-complete to compute the pebble cost in any of the three pebble games, and to compute the minimum depth of resolution refutations.
Alleviation of ultraviolet-C-induced oxidative damage through overexpression of cytosolic ascorbate peroxidase

Experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between ultraviolet (UV) C-induced oxidative damage and the activity of ascorbate peroxidase (APX), using transgenic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L. cv. Petit Havana) plants overexpressing cytosolic APX gene (apx1). Transgenic plants having 2.3 fold higher total APX activity, as compared to the wild type plants, showed normal morphological characters. Exposure of 70-day-old plants to fixed intensity UV-C radiation caused an increase in the malondialdehyde (MDA) content in wild type as well as transgenic plants. However, the wild type plants showed significantly higher (p < 0.05) lipid peroxidation as compared to the transgenic plants. Higher proline accumulation was recorded in transgenic plants as compared to the wild type plants, after 24 hours of UV-C exposure. Although the ascorbate content decreased continuously with increasing exposure to UV-C radiation, yet the wild type plants exhibited higher ascorbate levels than the transgenic plants. A marked difference in H2O2 content, between the wild type and transgenic plants, was consistently observed up to 20 hours of UV-C exposure. A direct correlation of ascorbate, MDA and H2O2 levels was recorded with the extent of oxidative stress, signifying that these could be used as potential bio-marker molecules for oxidative stress. The results clearly demonstrate that overexpression of cytosolic APX can protect tobacco plants from UV-C-induced oxidative damage.
Interpretability improvement of fuzzy systems: Reducing the number of unique singletons in zeroth order Takagi-Sugeno systems

This paper addresses one specific aspect of complexity reduction/interpretability improvement in fuzzy systems — how to limit the number of unique singletons in 0-th order Takagi-Sugeno (TS) systems, where the common practice is to assign an unique singleton to each rule. While abundance of free parameters makes 0-th order TS systems effective in data-driven identification, it also presents a computational load and an obstacle for interpretability and reliability of fuzzy rules. The developed reduction algorithm that utilizes singleton mapping matrix, subtractive clustering and least squares estimation algorithms, is able to bring the number of unique singletons down to the desired level without substantial accuracy loss.
Finding the right words in the study abroad context: The development of German learners' use of external modifiers in English

Abstract This paper examines the pragmatic development of nine German university students in a study abroad context over the period of one academic year. The investigation focuses on learners' ability to soften the illocutionary force of request utterances by employing a range of external modifiers. Data for the present investigation were elicited at three distinct points of the learners' sojourn in the target language environment: shortly after their arrival, in the middle of their stay and shortly before they returned home to Germany. The data were collected with the help of the Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) which had been specifically designed for the present study. The MET is a computer based instrument that contains 16 request scenarios. The study examines whether learners varied the use of external modifiers according to the status of their interlocutors and/or the imposition of the request. It also investigates whether their choice of modifiers over time seems to have been influenced by exposure to their L2 in the study abroad context by comparing the data of the German learners of English in England to data collected from 13 German learners of English in Germany with no study abroad experience and also to 15 British English native speakers.
Silhouette Segmentation in Multiple Views

In this paper, we present a method for extracting consistent foreground regions when multiple views of a scene are available. We propose a framework that automatically identifies such regions in images under the assumption that, in each image, background and foreground regions present different color properties. To achieve this task, monocular color information is not sufficient and we exploit the spatial consistency constraint that several image projections of the same space region must satisfy. Combining the monocular color consistency constraint with multiview spatial constraints allows us to automatically and simultaneously segment the foreground and background regions in multiview images. In contrast to standard background subtraction methods, the proposed approach does not require a priori knowledge of the background nor user interaction. Experimental results under realistic scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for multiple camera set ups.
Vaccine-associated paralytic polio in India.

In light of the increased risk of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) in India the Technical Consultative Group will have to revise its estimate of the global burden of VAPP and explore the possibility of replacing oral polio vaccine (OPV) with inactivated polio vaccine in order to avoid VAPP. In scientific and ethical terms eradication must result in the total absence of poliomyelitis due to any polioviruses wild or vaccine-related. (excerpt)
Design and evaluation of a BitTorrent proxy for energy saving

Recent studies indicate that the Internet-related energy consumption represents a significant, and increasing, part of the overall energy consumption of our society. The largest contribution to this consumption is due to Internet edge devices. Typically, users leave their PCs continuously on for satisfying the connectivity requirements of file sharing p2p applications, like BitTorrent. In this paper we propose a novel proxy-based BitTorrent architecture. BitTorrent users can delegate the download operations to the proxy and then power off, while the proxy downloads the requested files. We implemented our solution and validated it in a realistic testbed. Experimental results show that, with respect to a legacy approach, our solution is very effective in reducing the energy consumption (up to 95%) without introducing any QoS degradation
Comparison of Different Physical Activity Measurement Methods in Adults Aged 45 to 64 Years Under Free-Living Conditions

Objective: To compare physical activity (PA) measured by 4 methods in adults under free-living conditions in relation to selected demographic and anthropometric variables. Design: Cohort study. Setting: Department of Sports Medicine. Participants: Clinically healthy men (81) and women (69) aged 45 to 64 years. Interventions: Physical activity monitoring for 7 consecutive days under free-living conditions by pedometer (P) and accelerometer (A) simultaneously and PA questionnaires: International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and Seven-Day Physical Activity Questionnaire Recall (SDPAR) completed after the 7-day PA. Main Outcome Measures: Comparison of PA measured by pedometer, IPAQ, and SDPAR with accelerometer with regard to age, body mass, gender, and obesity type. Results: Total energy expenditure (EE) by IPAQ was higher than A (P < 0.001) in both groups regardless of age, body mass, or obesity type. Mean EE value by P was greater than A (P < 0.001) in central-obesity males and lower than A (P < 0.001) in central-obesity females. There were differences in step counts in women, unnoticed in men. SDPAR overestimated total EE in gynoid-obesity males and in central-obesity females compared with A. Ninety-five percent CI was the largest around IPAQ compared with P and SDPAR, with SDPAR showing the best agreement with A. Conclusions: Body mass and obesity type influenced PA measurements. To monitor PA, it is recommended to use pedometer in normal bodyweight and overweight groups while accelerometer is advisable in obese subjects. A combined approach of objective and subjective PA monitoring tools is preferable.
Lupus anticoagulant, thrombosis, and fetal loss.

The so-called lupus anticoagulant is an antibody (IgG or IgM or both) that prolongs phospholipid-dependent coagulation tests by binding to epitopes on the phospholipid portion of prothrombinase (a complex of factor Xa, factor Va, phospholipid, and calcium). 1 The anticoagulant derives its name from the fact that it was originally described in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and its site of action was unknown. Although this name has persisted, it is clearly a misnomer, since it has become clear that the lupus anticoagulant is more frequently encountered in patients without lupus, and it is not associated with abnormal bleeding in most .
Analysing and Comparing Encodability Criteria for Process Calculi

Encodings or the proof of their absence are the main way to compare process calculi. To analyse the quality of encodings and to rule out trivial or meaningless encodings, they are augmented with quality criteria. There exists a bunch of different criteria and different variants of criteria in order to reason in different settings. This leads to incomparable results. Moreover it is not always clear whether the criteria used to obtain a result in a particular setting do indeed fit to this setting. We show how to formally reason about and compare encodability criteria by mapping them on requirements on a relation between source and target terms that is induced by the encoding function. In particular we analyse the common criteria full abstraction, operational correspondence, divergence reflection, success sensitiveness, and respect of barbs; e.g. we analyse the exact nature of the simulation relation (coupled simulation versus bisimulation) that is induced by different variants of operational correspondence. This way we reduce the problem of analysing or comparing encodability criteria to the better understood problem of comparing relations on processes.
Evolutionary Algorithmic Parameter Optimization of MOEAs for Multiple Multi-objective Problems

Nowadays, algorithmic studies of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are flooded with too many search algorithms. Each MOEA has its own expert problem domain. To clarify not only the optimal MOEA and its parameters for each of multiple multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) but the robust MOEAs for multiple MOPs, this work proposes a meta-MOEA framework to search the Pareto optimal algorithmic parameters for multiple MOPs. In this work, we use two DTLZ2 benchmark problems with 2 and 4 objectives and optimize the base algorithm, the crossover rate and its parameter, the mutation rate and its parameter for the both DTLZ2 problems by the meta-MOEA. The experiment results show that the optimal algorithmic parameters for each of two DTLZ2 problems are different and the robust algorithmic parameters for both problems can be obtained by the meta-MOEA framework.
Online State-Based Structured SVM Combined With Incremental PCA for Robust Visual Tracking

In this paper, we propose a robust state-based structured support vector machine (SVM) tracking algorithm combined with incremental principal component analysis (PCA). Different from the current structured SVM for tracking, our method directly learns and predicts the object's states and not the 2-D translation transformation during tracking. We define the object's virtual state to combine the state-based structured SVM and incremental PCA. The virtual state is considered as the most confident state of the object in every frame. The incremental PCA is used to update the virtual feature vector corresponding to the virtual state and the principal subspace of the object's feature vectors. In order to improve the accuracy of the prediction, all the feature vectors are projected onto the principal subspace in the learning and prediction process of the state-based structured SVM. Experimental results on several challenging video sequences validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.
Implantable Impedance Plethysmography

We demonstrate by theory, as well as by ex vivo and in vivo measurements that impedance plethysmography, applied extravascularly directly on large arteries, is a viable method for monitoring various cardiovascular parameters, such as blood pressure, with high accuracy. The sensor is designed as an implant to monitor cardiac events and arteriosclerotic progression over the long term.
Differential Expression Analysis for Pathways

Life science technologies generate a deluge of data that hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of important biological functions and disease mechanisms. We present DEAP, Differential Expression Analysis for Pathways, which capitalizes on information about biological pathways to identify important regulatory patterns from differential expression data. DEAP makes significant improvements over existing approaches by including information about pathway structure and discovering the most differentially expressed portion of the pathway. On simulated data, DEAP significantly outperformed traditional methods: with high differential expression, DEAP increased power by two orders of magnitude; with very low differential expression, DEAP doubled the power. DEAP performance was illustrated on two different gene and protein expression studies. DEAP discovered fourteen important pathways related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and interferon treatment that existing approaches omitted. On the interferon study, DEAP guided focus towards a four protein path within the 26 protein Notch signalling pathway.
Nanosecond fluorescence resonance energy transfer‐fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy to localize the protein interactions in a single living cell

Visualizing and quantifying protein–protein interactions is a recent trend in biomedical imaging. The current advances in fluorescence microscopy, coupled with the development of new fluorescent probes such as green fluorescent proteins, allow fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) to be used to study protein interactions in living specimens. Intensity‐based FRET microscopy is limited by spectral bleed‐through and fluorophore concentration. Fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) microscopy and lifetime measurements are independent of change in fluorophore concentration or excitation intensity, and the combination of FRET and FLIM provides high spatial (nanometre) and temporal (nanoseconds) resolution. Because only the donor fluorophore lifetime is measured, spectral bleed‐through is not an issue in FRET–FLIM imaging. In this paper we describe the development of a nanosecond FRET–FLIM microscopy instrumentation to acquire the time‐resolved images of donor in the presence and the absence of the acceptor. Software was developed to process the acquired images for single and double exponential decays. Measurement of donor lifetime in two different conditions allowed us to calculate accurately the distance between the interacting proteins. We used this approach to quantify the dimerization of the transcription factor CAATT/enhancer binding protein alpha in living pituitary cells. The one‐ and two‐component analysis of the donor molecule lifetime in the presence of acceptor demonstrates the distance distribution between interacting proteins.