Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toxoplasma gondii myosins B/C

In apicomplexan parasites, actin-disrupting drugs and the inhibitor of myosin heavy chain ATPase, 2,3-butanedione monoxime, have been shown to interfere with host cell invasion by inhibiting parasite gliding motility. We report here that the actomyosin system of Toxoplasma gondii also contributes to the process of cell division by ensuring accurate budding of daughter cells. T. gondii myosins B and C are encoded by alternatively spliced mRNAs and differ only in their COOH-terminal tails. MyoB and MyoC showed distinct subcellular localizations and dissimilar solubilities, which were conferred by their tails. MyoC is the first marker selectively concentrated at the anterior and posterior polar rings of the inner membrane complex, structures that play a key role in cell shape integrity during daughter cell biogenesis. When transiently expressed, MyoB, MyoC, as well as the common motor domain lacking the tail did not distribute evenly between daughter cells, suggesting some impairment in proper segregation. Stable overexpression of MyoB caused a significant defect in parasite cell division, leading to the formation of extensive residual bodies, a substantial delay in replication, and loss of acute virulence in mice. Altogether, these observations suggest that MyoB/C products play a role in proper daughter cell budding and separation.
PRIVACY PREFERENCES: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF AMERICANS AND ASIAN INDIANS

The need for privacy and privacy preferences were studied from a cross-cultural perspective. The American culture and nuclear family emphasize individuality and privacy whereas the Asian Indian culture and joint family emphasize the group and togetherness. A sample of 141 Americans and 123 Indians completed the Privacy Preference Scale to determine differences in need for privacy and privacy preferences. Results showed that for most kinds of privacy, Indians have a lower need for privacy than Americans. These results provide some support for adaptation level theory as method of predicting privacy preferences.
[Relevance of CYP27B1 gene promoter polymorphism to autoimmune thyroid diseases].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between CYP27B1 gene promoter polymorphism and autoimmune thyroid diseases. METHODS A case-control study including 158 patients with Graves' disease (GD), 174 patients with Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) and 172 matched controls was conducted. Three genotypes of CYP27 B1 gene -1260 site (CC, AA and AC) were determined by restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) assay and confirmed by sequencing. RESULTS The genotypic distribution of CYP27 B1 gene-1260 site showed no deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The genotype and allele frequencies of -1260A/C were CC34.3%, AA19.2%, AC46.5%, C57.6%, and A42.4% in the control group, 48.1%, 13.3%, 38.6%, 67.4%, and 32.6% in GD group, and 47.1%, 10.3%, 42.5%, 68.4%, and 31.6% in HT group, respectively. Significant difference was found in the genotype and allele frequencies in -1260A/C polymorphism between GD and the control groups (Chi2=6.80, P<0.05 for genotype frequencies, and Chi2=6.79, P<0.05 for allele frequencies) and between HT and the control groups (Chi2=8.39, P<0.05 for genotype frequencies, and Chi2=8.71, P<0.05 for allele frequencies). CONCLUSION CYP27 B1 promoter -1260 polymorphism is associated with GD or HT in Chinese Han population.
Validation of Individual Pitch Control by Field Tests on Two- and Three-Bladed Wind Turbines

Further improvements in the cost-effectiveness of wind turbines drive designers toward larger, lighter, and more flexible structures, in which more intelligent control systems play an important part in actively reducing the applied structural loads. These improvements also help to eliminate the need for wind turbines to simply withstand the full force of the applied loads through the use of stronger, heavier, and therefore more expensive structures. One way to reduce the loads is to use individual pitch control (IPC), whereby each blade receives a different pitch command to compensate for asymmetrical loads caused by nonuniform flow across the rotor. Originating in helicopters, the use of IPC for wind turbines was suggested for many years. Although many simulation studies have shown that significant load reductions are possible, confirmation of this using field tests on a real turbine in natural turbulence is important to give wind turbine designers the confidence to design to the reduced loads that IPC can deliver. This paper presents the results of field tests on two different 600-kW wind turbines, one two-bladed and one three-bladed. The results demonstrate convincingly that the predicted load reductions can be achieved in practice.
Nitrification of Aspartate by Aspergillusflavus

Heterotrophic conversion of L-aspartic acid to nitrification products by Asper- gillus flavus was studied in a replacement incubation system. Numerous amino acids supported nitrification; aspartate and glutamate were about equivalent as the best sources of nitrate. Addition of sodium bicarbonate to the incubation system substantially enhanced nitrate formation for all nitrifiable amino acids except aspartic acid, but the basis for the bicarbonate effect is obscure. The yield of nitrate from L-aspartate was not approached by forms of aspartic acid resulting from substitution on the beta carbon, the amino nitrogen, or the gamma carboxyl group or by aspartate presented as the D-configuration. There was no relationship between nitrate formation and the occurrence of such possible intermediates as nitrite, bound hydroxylamine, ammonia, aspergillic acid, and beta-nitropropionic acid. Uniformly labeled '4C-L-aspartate that was nitrified in replacement incubation led to no accumulation of label in possible nitrification products in the culture filtrate. Label was found in components of the mycelium after acid hydrolysis, with heaviest accumulation in what appeared to be glucosamine and an unidenti-fied compound, possibly acetylglucosamine. Detectable label was redistributed into serine, glycine, and threonine.
Evaluation of Methods for Detection and Localization of Text in Video

The detection and recognition of text from unconstrained, general-purpose video is an important research problem with multiple applications in the surveillance, archiving and content-based retrieval contexts. Many text detection and localization algorithms have been proposed in the literature. However many of these algorithms either make simplistic assumptions as to the nature of the text to be found, or restrict themselves to a subclass of the wide variety of text that is observed in general purpose video. Almost all algorithms operate on images or individual video frames. It is also observed that the published results of most of these algorithms consist simply of sample images with bounded text boxes. There is a need for a quantitative evaluation of these algorithms against a challenging dataset. In this paper we present an evaluation of select text detection and localization algorithms. We present an evaluation of five algorithms. Some of these have been modified from the original work published by the authors. We discuss the method adopted for the evaluation and present results for the text localization methods. We observe that no one text detection and localization method is robust for detecting all kinds of text. It may be necessary to apply different methods that use independent heuristics to extract different kinds of text and then fuse these results temporally and across various algorithms.
Evaluation of BACTEC Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT 960) Automated System for Drug Susceptibility Testing ofMycobacterium tuberculosis

ABSTRACT The reliability of the BACTEC MGIT 960 system, an automated version of the Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT), for antimicrobial susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis was evaluated on 78 clinical isolates. Rifampin (RMP), isoniazid (INH), streptomycin (SM), and ethambutol (EMB) were tested at the following concentrations: 1.0 μg/ml for RMP, 0.1 and 0.4 μg/ml for INH, 1.0 and 4.0 μg/ml for SM, and 5.0 and 7.5 μg/ml for EMB. Results were compared with those obtained by the BACTEC 460 TB radiometric system. Initially the reproducibility study showed 99.5% agreement on repeat testing with all the four drugs. With susceptibility testing of clinical isolates, excellent agreement between the two systems was found for all the drugs. A total of nine major errors were observed for only three isolates, resistant according to BACTEC MGIT 960 and susceptible according to BACTEC 460 TB, to SM (4.0 μg/ml), INH (0.1 μg/ml), and EMB (5.0 μg/ml) (one isolate) and to SM (1.0 μg/ml), INH (0.4 μg/ml), and EMB (5.0 μg/ml) (two isolates). When these isolates were tested by using the conventional proportion method on Löwenstein-Jensen medium, agreement with BACTEC MGIT 960 was found for five results and with BACTEC 460 TB for the remainder. The time to report results was 7.9 days by MGIT 960 and 7.3 days by BACTEC 460 TB, which was not found statistically significant (P > 0.05). In conclusion, the performance of BACTEC MGIT 960 was found similar to that of BACTEC 460 TB and this new system can be considered a good alternative to the radiometric method for routine susceptibility testing of M. tuberculosis.
Nasal consonant speech errors: Implications for ‘‘similarity’’ and nasal harmony at a distance

It has been observed that nasals interact with ‘‘similar’’ consonants in phonological long distance nasal harmony [Walker, BLS 26, 321–332 (2000)]. In such patterns, nasals cause other consonants in a word to become nasal. Voiced stops and liquids are preferentially affected; in some cases obligatorily homorganic with the nasal. In this study we ask whether a parallel occurs in consonants with greater likelihood to participate in speech errors with nasals; specifically, is preferred interaction of voiced and homorganic stops with nasals also evident in the error pattern of a language without nasal harmony? Experiments were conducted on English speakers using the SLIPS technique [Baars and Motley, Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1974]. CVC word pairs were presented for reading. Critical pairs, primed to encourage initial consonant errors, were cued to be spoken. Experiment 1 (35 subjects) investigated whether more errors involve nasals and voiced stops than nasals and voiceless stops (partiall.
Remote Profiling of Resource Constraints of Web Servers Using Mini-Flash Crowds

Unexpected surges in Web request traffic can exercise server-side resources (e.g., access bandwidth, processing, storage etc.) in undesirable ways. Administrators today do not have requisite tools to understand the impact of such "flash crowds" on their servers. Most Web servers either rely on over-provisioning and admission control, or use potentially expensive solutions like CDNs, to ensure high availability in the face of flash crowds. A more fine-grained understanding of the performance of individual server resources under emulated but realistic and controlled flash crowd-like conditions can aid administrators to make more efficient resource management decisions. In this paper, we present miniflash crowds (MFC) - a light-weight profiling service that reveals resource bottlenecks in a Web server infrastructure. MFC uses a set of controlled probes where an increasing number of distributed clients make synchronized requests that exercise specific resources or portions of a remote Web server. We carried out controlled lab-based tests and experiments in collaboration with operators of production servers. We show that our approach can faithfully track the impact of request loads on different server resources and provide useful insights to server operators on the constraints of different components of their infrastructure. We also present results from a measurement study of the provisioning of several hundred popular Web servers, a few hundred Web servers of startup companies, and about hundred phishing servers.
Modelling of multisection bionic manipulator: Application to RobotinoXT

This paper deals with geometric models of a class of multisection bionic manipulator applied to RobotinoXT. This bio-inspired flexible manipulator is a small version of a multisection pneumatically actuated, called Bionic Handling Assistant robot (BHA), where each segment is composed by a set of backbones tubes. Experimental results are presented to compare the analytical and practical analysis. These models are the first steps to synthesis of kinematic and dynamic model of this class of bionic manipulator, which will be used to design an adequate control for the whole robot.
Automated Urban Travel Interpretation: A Bottom-up Approach for Trajectory Segmentation

Understanding travel behavior is critical for an effective urban planning as well as for enabling various context-aware service provisions to support mobility as a service (MaaS). Both applications rely on the sensor traces generated by travellers’ smartphones. These traces can be used to interpret travel modes, both for generating automated travel diaries as well as for real-time travel mode detection. Current approaches segment a trajectory by certain criteria, e.g., drop in speed. However, these criteria are heuristic, and, thus, existing approaches are subjective and involve significant vagueness and uncertainty in activity transitions in space and time. Also, segmentation approaches are not suited for real time interpretation of open-ended segments, and cannot cope with the frequent gaps in the location traces. In order to address all these challenges a novel, state based bottom-up approach is proposed. This approach assumes a fixed atomic segment of a homogeneous state, instead of an event-based segment, and a progressive iteration until a new state is found. The research investigates how an atomic state-based approach can be developed in such a way that can work in real time, near-real time and offline mode and in different environmental conditions with their varying quality of sensor traces. The results show the proposed bottom-up model outperforms the existing event-based segmentation models in terms of adaptivity, flexibility, accuracy and richness in information delivery pertinent to automated travel behavior interpretation.
Physiological, morphological, and ecological tradeoffs influence vertical habitat use of deep-diving toothed-whales in the Bahamas

Dive capacity among toothed whales (suborder: Odontoceti) has been shown to generally increase with body mass in a relationship closely linked to the allometric scaling of metabolic rates. However, two odontocete species tagged in this study, the Blainville’s beaked whale Mesoplodon densirostris and the Cuvier’s beaked whale Ziphius cavirostris, confounded expectations of a simple allometric relationship, with exceptionally long (mean: 46.1 min & 65.4 min) and deep dives (mean: 1129 m & 1179 m), and comparatively small body masses (med.: 842.9 kg & 1556.7 kg). These two species also exhibited exceptionally long recovery periods between successive deep dives, or inter-deep-dive intervals (M. densirostris: med. 62 min; Z. cavirostris: med. 68 min). We examined competing hypotheses to explain observed patterns of vertical habitat use based on body mass, oxygen binding protein concentrations, and inter-deep-dive intervals in an assemblage of five sympatric toothed whales species in the Bahamas. Hypotheses were evaluated using dive data from satellite tags attached to the two beaked whales (M. densirostris, n = 12; Z. cavirostris, n = 7), as well as melon-headed whales Peponocephala electra (n = 13), short-finned pilot whales Globicephala macrorhynchus (n = 15), and sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus (n = 27). Body mass and myoglobin concentration together explained only 36% of the variance in maximum dive durations. The inclusion of inter-deep-dive intervals, substantially improved model fits (R2 = 0.92). This finding supported a hypothesis that beaked whales extend foraging dives by exceeding aerobic dive limits, with the extension of inter-deep-dive intervals corresponding to metabolism of accumulated lactic acid. This inference points to intriguing tradeoffs between body size, access to prey in different depth strata, and time allocation within dive cycles. These tradeoffs and resulting differences in habitat use have important implications for spatial distribution patterns, and relative vulnerabilities to anthropogenic impacts.
Semantic-driven manufacturing process management automation

The maturity of IT, in conjunction with certain modern theories about Business Processes Management (BPM), has propitiated an appropriate scenario for meeting the needs of new business models, which are increasingly centred on mass customization. Integration solutions provided within the framework of manufacturing organisations have opened up a wide range of possibilities in process management, which, paradoxically, is causing the traditional bottleneck between the enterprise level and production levels to now be transferred to the process management and modelling levels. This paper proposes the incorporation of knowledge into the definition of the processes and services involved by means of an ontology, thus maximising the automation of process modelling and facilitating the work of process engineers.
A Direction Entropy-Based Forwarding Scheme in an Opportunistic Network

In an opportunistic network, one of the most challenging issues is the equilibrium of the network traffic and transmission delay for forwarding messages. To resolve this problem, we propose a new forwarding scheme, called the direction entropy-based forwarding scheme (DEFS), using the main direction and direction entropy based on the information collected about the directions of the nodes in the network. Since each node sends a message to another node with a different location and less direction entropy, DEFS utilizes those nodes that are more likely to travel to various locations to forward the messages to the destination nodes. Experiments were performed on the network simulator NS-2. The results show that DEFS provides better balance than the typical forwarding schemes, such as Epidemic, PRoPHET, and WAIT. Category: Ubiquitous computing
Stroke Treatment Academic Industry Roundtable: Research Priorities in the Assessment of Neurothrombectomy Devices

Background and Purpose— The goal of the Stroke Treatment Academic Industry Roundtable (STAIR) meetings is to advance the development of stroke therapies. At STAIR VIII, consensus recommendations were developed for clinical trial strategies to demonstrate the benefit of endovascular reperfusion therapies for acute ischemic stroke. Summary of Review— Prospects for success with forthcoming endovascular trials are robust, because new neurothrombectomy devices have superior reperfusion efficacy compared with earlier-generation interventions. Specific recommendations are provided for trial designs in 3 populations: (1) patients undergoing intravenous fibrinolysis, (2) early patients ineligible for or having failed intravenous fibrinolysis, and (3) wake-up and other late-presenting patients. Among intravenous fibrinolysis–eligible patients, key principles are that CT or MRI confirmation of target arterial occlusions should precede randomization; endovascular intervention should be pursued with the greatest rapidity possible; and combined intravenous and neurothrombectomy therapy is more promising than neurothrombectomy alone. Among patients ineligible for or having failed intravenous fibrinolysis, scientific equipoise was affirmed and the need to randomize all eligible patients emphasized. Vessel imaging to confirm occlusion is mandatory, and infarct core and penumbral imaging is desirable in later time windows. Additional STAIR VIII recommendations include approaches to test multiple devices in a single trial, utility weighting of disability end points, and adaptive designs to delineate time and tissue injury thresholds at which benefits from intervention no longer accrue. Conclusions— Endovascular research priorities in acute ischemic stroke are to perform trials testing new, highly effective neuro thrombectomy devices rapidly deployed in patients confirmed to have target vessel occlusions.
Memristor based feedback systems

The contribution is concerned on the properties of the new ideal circuit element, a memristor. By definition, a memristor relates the charge q and the magnetic flux in a circuit, and complements a resistor R, a capacitor C, and an inductor L as an ingredient of ideal electrical circuits. The properties of these three elements and their circuits are a part of the standard curricula. The existence of the memristor as the fourth ideal circuit element was predicted in 1971 based on symmetry arguments, but was clearly experimentally demonstrated in 2008. The definition of the memristor is based solely on fundamental circuit variables, similar to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Unlike those more familiar elements, the necessarily nonlinear memristors may be described by any of a variety of time-varying functions. As a result, memristors do not belong to linear time-invariant circuit models. A linear time-invariant memristor is simply a conventional resistor.
A case study using literacy assessment portfolios with students identified with disabilities

The purpose of this case study, using a qualitative research design, was to examine the process of using literacy assessment portfolios (LAPs) within a cross-categorical special education classroom to investigate whether or not using LAPs would provide distinct information about the literacy development of two students identified with specific learning disabilities and one student identified with autism. It also investigated whether or not the information obtained from the LAPs would impact the teacherdecisioncy development. The outcomes of this case study showed that student reading skills improved, their attitudes toward academic reading improved, there was an increased awareness of their reading/writing needs and behavior, and students self-evaluated their own progress while demonstrating increased confidence. The outcomes for parents showed that parents not only wanted to be involved in changed after the LAP process b
Sensors & Transducers

In event-triggered, outdoor applications of wireless sensor networks, the decision on the occurrence or otherwise of the event of interest is often influenced by the prevalence of errors and false alarms. Imprecise event detection decision (EDD) could prove costly for end users and processes that rely on the outcome of such EDD mechanisms. In this paper, we propose the application of Gini index as an EDD tool. We compare this method against the d’ (d-prime) solution strategy in Signal Detection Theory (SDT). Results obtained illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, serving as stimulus for further research on the subject. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.