Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disruption of the M2 Gene of Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68 Alters Splenic Latency following Intranasal, but Not Intraperitoneal, Inoculation

ABSTRACT Infection of mice with murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (γHV68; also referred to as MHV68) provides a tractable small-animal model with which to address the requirements for the establishment and maintenance of gammaherpesvirus infection in vivo. The M2 gene of γHV68 is a latency-associated gene that encodes a protein lacking discernible homology to any known viral or cellular proteins. M2 gene transcripts have been detected in latently infected splenocytes (S. M. Husain, E. J. Usherwood, H. Dyson, C. Coleclough, M. A. Coppola, D. L. Woodland, M. A. Blackman, J. P. Stewart, and J. T. Sample, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96:7508-7513, 1999; H. W. Virgin IV, R. M. Presti, X. Y. Li, C. Liu, and S. H. Speck, J. Virol. 73:2321-2332, 1999) and peritoneal exudate cells (H. W. Virgin IV, R. M. Presti, X. Y. Li, C. Liu, and S. H. Speck, J. Virol. 73:2321-2332, 1999), as well as in a latently γHV68-infected B-lymphoma cell line (S. M. Husain, E. J. Usherwood, H. Dyson, C. Coleclough, M. A. Coppola, D. L. Woodland, M. A. Blackman, J. P. Stewart, and J. T. Sample, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96:7508-7513, 1999). Here we describe the generation of γHV68 mutants with disruptions in the M2 gene. Mutation of the M2 gene did not affect the ability of the virus to replicate in tissue culture, nor did it affect γHV68 virulence in B6.Rag1 deficient mice. However, we found that M2 was differentially required for acute replication in vivo. While mutation of M2 did not affect acute phase of virus replication in the lungs of mice following intranasal inoculation, acute-phase virus replication in the spleen was decreased compared to that of the wild-type and marker rescue viruses following intraperitoneal inoculation. Upon intranasal inoculation, M2 mutant viruses exhibited a significant decrease in the establishment of latency in the spleen on day 16 postinfection, as measured by the frequency of viral genome-positive cells. In addition, M2 mutant viral genome-positive cells reactivated from latency inefficiently compared to wild-type and marker rescue viruses. By day 42 after intranasal inoculation, the frequencies of M2 mutant and wild-type viral genome-positive cells were nearly equivalent and little reactivation was detected from either population. In sharp contrast to the results obtained following intranasal inoculation, after intraperitoneal inoculation, no significant defect was observed in the establishment or reactivation from latency with the M2 mutant viruses. These results indicate that the requirements for the establishment of latency are affected by the route of infection.
The application of electrical impedance tomography to reduce systematic errors in the EEG inverse problem - a simulation study

In this paper we propose a new method, using the principles of electrical impedance tomography (EIT), to correct for the systematic errors in the inverse problem (IP) of electroencephalography (EEG) that arise from the wrong specification of the electrical conductivities of the head compartments. By injecting known currents into pairs of electrodes and measuring the resulting potential differences recorded from the other electrodes, the equivalent conductivities of brain (σ3), skull (σ2) and scalp (σ1) can be estimated. Since the geometry of the head is assumed to be known, the electrical conductivities remain as the only unknown parameters to be estimated. These conductivities can then be used in the inverse problem of EEG. The simulations performed in this study, using a three-layer sphere to model the head, prove the feasibility of the method, theoretically. Even in the presence of simulated noise with a value of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) equal to 10, estimations of the electrical conductivities within 5% of the true values were obtained. Simulations showed the existence of a strong relation between errors in the skull thickness and the EIT estimated conductivities. If the skull thickness is wrongly specified, for example overestimated by a factor of two, the conductivity determined by EIT is also overestimated by a factor of two. Simulations showed that this compensation effect also works in the inverse problem of EEG. Application of the proposed method reduces systematic errors in the dipole localization, up to an amount of 1 cm. However it proved to be ineffective to decrease the dipole strength error.
MAKING AND MANAGING ELECTRONIC CHILDREN: E-assessment in child welfare

‘Every Child Matters’ (ECM) is a government response to longstanding concerns about child welfare and protection. A key feature is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve information sharing and inter-professional communication. One of the proposals requires the establishment of an index, ContactPoint, which is a database containing information on all children in their area, to be used by child welfare professionals to indicate their involvement with a child and, where there is ‘cause for concern’, to facilitate joint action. Whilst these proposals for harnessing ICTs within child welfare are a central part of the government's modernization strategy, plans for the Index have been heavily criticized for its panoptic potential to invade privacy and override professional discretion and judgement. This paper reports findings from an ethnographic study funded by the ESRC e-Society Programme. Drawing on data collected in one ‘Trailblazer’ local authority area during the pilot phase, it describes the introduction of a local child index and the ways in which professionals and the technologies are drawn together within the local child welfare network. For the Index to achieve its original purpose of improving information sharing and inter-professional communication it must be ‘used’ by child welfare practitioners. But establishing the Index as a friend to the child welfare professional is not a straightforward process. The research suggests this is dependent on a set of relations that are being constantly negotiated and accomplished in everyday practice. It is clear the deployment of ICTs in professional practice is highly contingent upon local policy implementation, the local arrangement of services and the everyday practices of busy and sceptical practitioners.
Do We Need Specialized Graph Databases?: Benchmarking Real-Time Social Networking Applications

With the advent of online social networks, there is an increasing demand for storage and processing of graph-structured data. Social networking applications pose new challenges to data management systems due to demand for real-time querying and manipulation of the graph structure. Recently, several systems specialized systems for graph-structured data have been introduced. However, whether we should abandon mature RDBMS technology for graph databases remains an ongoing discussion. In this paper we present an graph database benchmarking architecture built on the existing LDBC Social Network Benchmark. Our proposed architecture stresses the systems with an interactive transactional workload to better simulate the real-time nature of social networking applications. Using this improved architecture, we evaluated a selection of specialized graph databases, RDF stores, and RDBMSes adapted for graphs. We do not find that specialized graph databases provide definitively better performance.
Assessment of elbow joint kinematics in passive motion by electromagnetic motion tracking

This research provides a detailed analysis of the kinematics of passive elbow motion. It quantifies how closely humeroulnar kinematics approximates rotation around a fixed axis. The results are clinically relevant for emerging treatment modalities that impose an artificial hinge to the elbow joint, such as total elbow arthroplasty and articulated external fixation. In a cadaveric study of seven specimens, we quantified ulnar rotation around the humerus in terms of instantaneous screw displacement axes calculated from electromagnetic motion‐tracking source data. This methodology enabled description of the complex excursion of the elbow axis in terms of translation and orientation changes of the screw displacement axes over the range of motion. Furthermore, we analyzed the envelope of joint laxity for elbow motion under applied small varus and valgus moments. In addition, radiographic landmarks of clinical utility for axis location were evaluated by visualizing the elbow's radiographic appearance when viewed from along the calculated best‐fit (average) rotation axis. Over the normal range of elbow motion, the screw displacement axis varied 2.6–5.7° in orientation and 1.4–2.0 mm in translation. All instantaneous rotation axes nearly intersected on the medial facet of the trochlea. The breadth of the envelope of varus‐valgus joint laxity was greatest within the initial 40° of flexion and decreased by a factor of approximately two for flexion angles exceeding 100°.
A guide to practitioner research in education

related issues. He argues that sincerity in RE research is significant and involves more than ‘‘not lying’’; it is about bringing teachers and pupils in classrooms to be bound together in a rich dialogue of truths and human development, and this can lead the way to research-rich schooling (p. 110). Indeed, sincerity is a good predictor of trust and should occupy an important place in contemporary RE research. A possible weakness of the book is the lack of attention to some major current topics such as the substantial debate over the status of creationism and evolution in education, and how it can be handled in RE classes by the aid of research. Overall, Stern’s book is a key text which is an excellent introduction to RE research. Although it is not exhaustive, it should provide some useful pointers on the subject, especially for those unfamiliar with RE research, and it will be important reading for student teachers at all levels.
Individual Responsibility, Culture, or State Organized Enslavement? How Tea Party Activists Frame Racial Inequality

This article explores how Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party activists produce and circulate stories about racial inequality, presenting four distinct frames that reflect nonconformity in the Tea Party’s racial narrative. Activists engage with four racial frames: racism denial, individual responsibility, cultural responsibility, and structural responsibility. The Tea Party unites using frame amplification to emphasize the master frame of color blindness that allows activists, regardless of the frame with which they engage, to unite under the broader notion that they are all idyllically color blind.
Interindividual and interethnic variation in genomewide gene expression: insights into the biological variation of gene expression and clinical implications.

BACKGROUND Analysis of gene expression in peripheral blood samples is increasingly being applied in biomarker studies of disease diagnosis and prognosis. Although knowledge of interindividual and interethnic variation in gene expression is required to set ethnicity-specific reference intervals and to select reference genes and preferred markers from a list of candidate genes, few studies have attempted to characterize such biological variation on a genomewide scale. METHODS The genomewide expression profiles of 11 355 transcripts expressed among 210 multiethnic individuals of the HapMap project were obtained and analyzed; 4 replicates were included for each sample. The total biological CV in gene expression (CV(b)) was partitioned into interindividual (CV(g)), inter-ethnic group (CV(e)), and residual components by random-effects mixed models. RESULTS CV(g) was the major component of CV(b), and the differences among transcripts were large (up to 38%). Distinct groups of genes were characterized by CV values and expression levels. Of the genes with lowest biological variation (CV(b) < 1.5%), 35 genes were highly expressed, whereas 32 had intermediate or low expression. Although CV(g) was almost always greater than CV(e), we identified 10 genes in which ethnic variation predominated (range, 8%-18%). On the other hand, 17 annotated genes were highly variable with CV(g) values ranging between 15% and 38%. CONCLUSIONS Genomewide analysis of gene expression variation demonstrated biological differences among transcripts. Transcripts with the least biological variation are better candidates for reference genes, whereas those with low interindividual variation may be good disease markers. The presence of interethnic variation suggests that ethnicity-specific reference intervals may be necessary.
Application of antigen-detection enzyme immunoassay for the diagnosis of porcine Trypanosoma brucei infection.

The prevalence rate of Trypanosoma brucei infection in pigs was appraised by a monoclonal antibody-based antigen-detection enzyme immunoassay (antigen-ELISA). Blood samples were collected in the abattoir from pigs reared in the rain forest and derived savannah region of Nigeria under the traditional extensive management system. Blood samples were also collected from 50 exotic pigs reared on a commercial farm with fly-proof pens. These blood samples were analyzed for presence of trypanosomes and antigens in peripheral blood. Of 189 porcine blood samples 51 (27.0%) were positive for circulating antigens, whereas only 4 (2.1%) had demonstrable trypanosomes as revealed by the haematocrit centrifugation/buffy-coat technique. When the 51 blood samples collected in EDTA tube corresponding to those sera that were positive for T. brucei antigens were subinoculated into mice, 46 (90.1%), the mice became infected. Demonstration of trypanosomes in the infected mice is supportive proof that the parasites were residing in the infected hosts. Samples collected from 50 exotic pigs in fly-proof pens were all antigenELISA negative. In addition, none of the corresponding 50 control blood samples had demonstrable trypanosomes by the buffy-coat method, nor do they show detectable parasites after subinoculation into mice. Thus, antigen-ELISA appeared to be a better and more useful tool for mass sero-epidemiological survey of porcine T. brucei infection when compared to the buffy-coat technique.
Querying discriminative and representative samples for batch mode active learning

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) provides a useful guideline for many machine learning and data mining algorithms. Under the ERM principle, one minimizes an upper bound of the true risk, which is approximated by the summation of empirical risk and the complexity of the candidate classifier class. To guarantee a satisfactory learning performance, ERM requires that the training data are i.i. d. sampled from the unknown source distribution. However, this may not be the case in active learning, where one selects the most informative samples to label and these data may not follow the source distribution. In this paper, we generalize the empirical risk minimization principle to the active learning setting. We derive a novel form of upper bound for the true risk in the active learning setting; by minimizing this upper bound we develop a practical batch mode active learning method. The proposed formulation involves a non-convex integer programming optimization problem. We solve it efficiently by an alternating optimization method. Our method is shown to query the most informative samples while preserving the source distribution as much as possible, thus identifying the most uncertain and representative queries. Experiments on benchmark data sets and real-world applications demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.
Is high-quality vod feasible using P2P swarming?

Peer-to-peer technologies are increasingly becoming the medium of choice for deliveringmedia content, both professional and home-grown, to large user populations. Indeed, current P2P swarming systems have been shown to be very efficient for large-scale content distribution with few server resources.However, such systems have been designed for generic file distribution and provide a limited user experience for viewing media content.For example, users need to wait to download the full video before they can start watching it.In general, the main challenge resides in designing systems that ensure that users can start watching a movie at any point in time, with small start-up times and sustainable playback rates. In this work, we address the issues of providing a Video-on-Demand (VoD) using P2P mesh-based networks. We show that providing high quality VoD using P2P is feasible using a combination of techniquesincluding (a) network coding, (b) optimized resource allocation across different parts of the video, and (c) overlay topology management algorithms.Our evaluation also shows that systems that do not use these techniques and do not optimize all of those dimensions can significantly under-utilize the network resources and result in poor VoD performance.Our results are based on simulations and results from a prototype implementation.
Designing productive gradations of tasks in primary programming education

In several countries, we can recently notice increasing demand to establish modern Computer Science (CS) or Informatics or Computing education in the primary and secondary schools, which would liberate from the common ICT in education conception. In Slovakia we have proceeded in the opposite way -- establishing mandatory CS subject named Informatics nearly 30 years ago in all secondary schools and in 2000 (as a pilot) and 2008 (as a regular subject) in all primary schools. Moreover, educational programming has always been one of the key components of this subject. In this paper, we report on one of our on-going research activities in the area of building and integrating our conception of educational programming into regular primary Informatics. Namely, we present the process and findings of a qualitative study, in which we develop and verify a new approach to designing programming tasks for primary students. We want to understand what cognitive demands these tasks pose to primary students, what the students consider difficult and what they consider easy -- we are in search of better pedagogy for the primary programming education. To meet these goals, we need to identify elementary cognitive operations in primary programming and on the basis of that learn how to be more competent in considering the level of difficulty of the programming tasks and how to design proper gradational sequences (gradations) of tasks, which will support smooth learning process of the primary students' programming skills and early computational thinking -- carefully respecting developmental appropriateness of these activities.
A Statistical Video Content Recognition Method Using Invariant Features on Object Trajectories

This work is dedicated to a statistical trajectory-based approach addressing two issues related to dynamic video content understanding: recognition of events and detection of unexpected events. Appropriate local differential features combining curvature and motion magnitude are defined and robustly computed on the motion trajectories in the image sequence. These features are invariant to image translation, in-the-plane rotation and spatial scaling. The temporal causality of the features is then captured by hidden Markov models dedicated to trajectory description, whose states are properly quantized values. The similarity between trajectories is expressed by exploiting this quantization-based HMM framework. Moreover statistical techniques have been developed for parameter estimations. Evaluations of the method have been conducted on several data sets including real trajectories obtained from sport videos, especially Formula One and ski TV program. The novel method compares favorably with other methods including feature histogram comparisons, HMM/GMM modeling and SVM classification.
Relationship Between Metacommunication among Romantic Partners and Their Level of Relationship Satisfaction

The purpose of this study was to examine the possible relationship between metacommunication and relationship satisfaction among partners in romantic relationships. Metacommunication is communication about communication. This research used surveys to collect data from people who were currently at the time of the data collection or who ever had been in romantic relationships. A scale for metacommunication was developed by the researcher to measure people’s levels of metacommunication, and an existing scale was utilized to measure people’s levels of relationship satisfaction. According to data analysis, a positive relationship exists between metacommunication and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners.
Eficiência no desempenho econômico financeiro de cooperativas de crédito brasileiras

O objetivo desta pesquisa consiste em verificar a eficiencia global no desempenho economico-financeiro de cooperativas de credito brasileiras. Para tanto, adotou-se a metodologia denominada pelo acronimo PEARLS, aplicada as 25 maiores cooperativas de credito brasileiras, para o periodo de 2008 a 2012. As informacoes necessarias para calcular os indicadores foram coletadas junto aos seus relatorios disponibilizados pelo BACEN. Os indicadores do PEARLS foram submetidos a Analise de Componentes Principais (ACP) para selecao dos mais relevantes em termos de informacao. Apos a ACP restaram 20 indicadores, os quais foram utilizados para determinar a eficiencia das cooperativas por meio do metodo multicriterio TOPSIS. Os resultados apontaram uma concentracao de cooperativas pertencentes ao Sicoob e a Unicred entre as mais eficientes da amostra, e entre as menos eficientes ha maior predominância de cooperativas filiadas ao Sicredi. As cooperativas de credito brasileiras podem elevar seu desempenho e adequar sua estrutura com melhorias no desempenho e na eficiencia, e, consequentemente, com sua principal funcao, que consiste em zelar pela maximizacao dos produtos e servicos ofertados aos cooperados e assim, atender suas necessidades de forma eficiente em prol do bem comum dos cooperados.