Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cohesion, coherence, and expert evaluations of writing proficiency

This study investigates the roles of cohesion and coherence in evaluations of essay quality. Cohesion generally has a facilitative effect on text comprehension and is assumed to be related to essay coherence. By contrast, recent studies of essay writing have demonstrated that computational indices of cohesion are not predictive of evaluations of writing quality. This study investigates expert ratings of individual text features, including coherence, in order to examine their relation to evaluations of holistic essay quality. The results suggest that coherence is an important attribute of overall essay quality, but that expert raters evaluate coherence based on the absence of cohesive cues in the essays rather than their presence. This finding has important implications for text understanding and the role of coherence in writing quality.
A computable general equilibrium model to analyze distributive aspects in Brazil with a trade policy illustration

This paper presents a Computable General Equilibrium model specified to simulate the policy impacts on income distribution in Brazil, with complex and systemic propagation methods. To capture the distributive impacts, the model adopts a design focused on the separation of production and institutional factors, as labor and households. The model has three blocks: product and factor markets, and a block that handles with income transfers among institutions. The labor market specification incorporates a recent theoretical advance that allows the determination of involuntary unemployment in the equilibrium. The third block specifies the distribution of the value added among production factors and the redistribution of income among agents/institutions. The simulations of a partial economic "closure" show modest welfare reduction for most workers and families. Also, we checked that the homogeneity property of the model holds only with full indexation of all income transfers, which has important implications for the income distribution process modeling.
Mlo, a Modulator of Plant Defense and Cell Death, Is a Novel Calmodulin-binding Protein

Transient influx of Ca2+ constitutes an early event in the signaling cascades that trigger plant defense responses. However, the downstream components of defense-associated Ca2+ signaling are largely unknown. Because Ca2+ signals are mediated by Ca2+-binding proteins, including calmodulin (CaM), identification and characterization of CaM-binding proteins elicited by pathogens should provide insights into the mechanism by which Ca2+ regulates defense responses. In this study, we isolated a gene encoding rice Mlo (Oryza sativa Mlo;OsMlo) using a protein-protein interaction-based screening of a cDNA expression library constructed from pathogen-elicited rice suspension cells. OsMlo has a molecular mass of 62 kDa and shares 65% sequence identity and scaffold topology with barley Mlo, a heptahelical transmembrane protein known to function as a negative regulator of broad spectrum disease resistance and leaf cell death. By using gel overlay assays, we showed that OsMlo produced inEscherichia coli binds to soybean CaM isoform-1 (SCaM-1) in a Ca2+-dependent manner. We located a 20-amino acid CaM-binding domain (CaMBD) in the OsMlo C-terminal cytoplasmic tail that is necessary and sufficient for Ca2+-dependent CaM complex formation. Specific binding of the conserved CaMBD to CaM was corroborated by site-directed mutagenesis, a gel mobility shift assay, and a competition assay with a Ca2+/CaM-dependent enzyme. Expression ofOsMlo was strongly induced by a fungal pathogen and by plant defense signaling molecules. We propose that binding of Ca2+-loaded CaM to the C-terminal tail may be a common feature of Mlo proteins.
Comparative analysis of the effect of ozone treatment on the properties of mulberry and tassar silk fabrics

The effect of ozone treatment on the properties of raw and degummed mulberry and tassar silk fabrics has recently been studied, and the investigation of results has been published. The variables, namely, wet pickup, pH and treatment time used in the treatment have shown a significant effect on properties such as the yellowness index, breaking strength, breaking elongation, amino group content, weight and flexural rigidity of the silk fabrics. In addition to this study, a comparative analysis has been made to find the difference in properties of ozone‐treated raw and degummed mulberry and tassar silk fabrics, for conditions that showed a significant effect on the properties, and these are presented in this paper. The results show that ozone treatment has a pronounced effect on the properties of mulberry raw and tassar raw silk fabrics compared with mulberry degummed and tassar degummed silk fabrics.
Hemodynamic changes after an intensive short-term exercise and nutrition program in hypertensive and obese patients with and without coronary artery disease.

PURPOSE To assess the effectiveness of the Pritikin diet and exercise program on cardiovascular hemodynamics using the noninvasive technique of Thoracic Electrical Bioimpedance (TEB). MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty subjects divided in two groups, according to their body habitus and hemodynamic disturbances. These data were compared to a group of 10 healthy individuals not involved in the program. Hemodynamic parameters were collected at admission and at the end of the intensive 26-day program of exercise and nutrition. RESULTS In obese and hypertensive subjects not on medication we observed that cardiac index increased from 3.27 +/- 0.4 to 3.58 + 0.5 L/min/m2; mean arterial pressure decreased from 100 +/- 8.5 to 94.8 +/- 7.9 mmHg while systemic vascular resistance index decreased from 2362 +/- 391 to 1934 +/- 357 dynes. sec. cm-5/m2; p less than 0.05 (Data obtained in supine position). Also documented was a improvement in ventricular performance after postural changes from upright to supine based on indices of left ventricular performance, uniquely obtained by the TEB technique. From admission to discharge, changes were: Ejection fraction 48% to 53%; Peak flow index 295 to 316 ml/s/m2 and Index of contractility 40 to 47 s-1, explained by a shift on the ascending limb of the Starling curve. CONCLUSION In a selected population, this rehabilitation program is effective for hemodynamic improvement that can be partially explained by metabolic and biochemical changes already reported from this Center.
Investigation of Antioxidative and Anticancer Potentials of Streptomyces sp. MUM256 Isolated from Malaysia Mangrove Soil

A Streptomyces strain, MUM256 was isolated from Tanjung Lumpur mangrove soil in Malaysia. Characterization of the strain showed that it has properties consistent with those of the members of the genus Streptomyces. In order to explore the potential bioactivities, extract of the fermented broth culture of MUM256 was prepared with organic solvent extraction method. DPPH and SOD activity were utilized to examine the antioxidant capacity and the results have revealed the potency of MUM256 in superoxide anion scavenging activity in dose-dependent manner. The cytotoxicity of MUM256 extract was determined using cell viability assay against 8 different panels of human cancer cell lines. Among all the tested cancer cells, HCT116 was the most sensitive toward the extract treatment. At the highest concentration of tested extract, the result showed 2.3-, 2.0-, and 1.8-folds higher inhibitory effect against HCT116, HT29, and Caco-2 respectively when compared to normal cell line. This result has demonstrated that MUM256 extract was selectively cytotoxic toward colon cancer cell lines. In order to determine the constituents responsible for its bioactivities, the extract was then subjected to chemical analysis using GC-MS. The analysis resulted in the identification of chemical constituents including phenolic and pyrrolopyrazine compounds which may responsible for antioxidant and anticancer activities observed. Based on the findings of this study, the presence of bioactive constituents in MUM256 extract could be a potential source for the development of antioxidative and chemopreventive agents.
Using Physically-Modeled Synthetic Data to Assess Hyperspectral Unmixing Approaches

This paper considers an experimental approach for assessing algorithms used to exploit remotely sensed data. The approach employs synthetic images that are generated using physical models to make them more realistic while still providing ground truth data for quantitative evaluation. This approach complements the common approach of using real data and/or simple model-generated data. To demonstrate the value of such an approach, the behavior of the FastICA algorithm as a hyperspectral unmixing technique is evaluated using such data. This exploration leads to a number of useful insights such as: (1) the need to retain more dimensions than indicated by eigenvalue analysis to obtain near-optimal results; (2) conditions in which orthogonalization of unmixing vectors is detrimental to the exploitation results; and (3) a means for improving FastICA unmixing results by recognizing and compensating for materials that have been split into multiple abundance maps.
Can life-cycle assessment produce reliable policy guidelines in the building sector?

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an established methodology that can provide decision-makers with comprehensive data on the environmental impacts of products and processes during the entire life cycle. However, the literature on building LCAs consists of highly varying results between the studies, even when the assessed buildings are very similar. This makes it doubtful if LCA can actually produce reliable data for supporting policy-making in the building sector. However, no prior reviews looking into this issue in the building sector exist. This study includes an extensive literature review of LCA studies on the pre-use phase of buildings. The purpose of this study is to analyze the variation between the results of different studies and find out whether the differences can be explained by the contextual differences or if it is actually the methodological choices that cause the extremely high variation. We present 116 cases from 47 scientific articles and reports that used process LCA, input–output (IO) LCA or hybrid LCA to study the construction-phase GHG emissions of buildings. The results of the reviewed studies vary between 0.03 and 2.00 tons of GHG emissions per gross area. The lowest was assessed with process LCA and highest with IO LCA, and in general the lower end was found to be dominated by process LCA studies and the higher end by IO LCA studies, hybrid LCAs being placed in between. In general, it is the methodological issues and subjective choices of the LCA practitioner that cause the vast majority of the huge variance in the results. It thus seems that currently the published building LCAs do not offer solid background information for policy-making without deep understanding of the premises of a certain study and good methodological knowledge.
LIMSI @ IWSLT 2010

This paper describes LIMSI’s Statistical Machine Translation systems (SMT) for the IWSLT evaluation, where we participated in two tasks (Talk for English to French and BTEC for Turkish to English). For the Talk task, we studied an extension of our in-house n-code SMT system (the integration of a bilingual reordering model over generalized translation units), as well as the use of training data extracted from Wikipedia in order to adapt the target language model. For the BTEC task, we concentrated on pre-processing schemes on the Turkish side in order to reduce the morphological discrepancies with the English side. We also evaluated the use of two different continuous space language models for such a small size of training data.
WebGestalt: an integrated system for exploring gene sets in various biological contexts

High-throughput technologies have led to the rapid generation of large-scale datasets about genes and gene products. These technologies have also shifted our research focus from ‘single genes’ to ‘gene sets’. We have developed a web-based integrated data mining system, WebGestalt (), to help biologists in exploring large sets of genes. WebGestalt is composed of four modules: gene set management, information retrieval, organization/visualization, and statistics. The management module uploads, saves, retrieves and deletes gene sets, as well as performs Boolean operations to generate the unions, intersections or differences between different gene sets. The information retrieval module currently retrieves information for up to 20 attributes for all genes in a gene set. The organization/visualization module organizes and visualizes gene sets in various biological contexts, including Gene Ontology, tissue expression pattern, chromosome distribution, metabolic and signaling pathways, protein domain information and publications. The statistics module recommends and performs statistical tests to suggest biological areas that are important to a gene set and warrant further investigation. In order to demonstrate the use of WebGestalt, we have generated 48 gene sets with genes over-represented in various human tissue types. Exploration of all the 48 gene sets using WebGestalt is available for the public at .
Comparative Genomics of Bordetella pertussis Reveals Progressive Gene Loss in Finnish Strains

Background Bordetella pertussis is a Gram-negative bacterium that infects the human respiratory tract and causes pertussis or whooping cough. The disease has resurged in many countries including Finland where the whole-cell pertussis vaccine has been used for more than 50 years. Antigenic divergence has been observed between vaccine strains and clinical isolates in Finland. To better understand genome evolution in B. pertussis circulating in the immunized population, we developed an oligonucleotide-based microarray for comparative genomic analysis of Finnish strains isolated during the period of 50 years. Methodology/Principal Findings The microarray consisted of 3,582 oligonucleotides (70-mer) and covered 94% of 3,816 ORFs of Tohama I, the strain of which the genome has been sequenced [1]. Twenty isolates from 1953 to 2004 were studied together with two Finnish vaccine strains and two international reference strains. The isolates were selected according to their characteristics, e.g. the year and place of isolation and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis profiles. Genomic DNA of the tested strains, along with reference DNA of Tohama I strain, was labelled and hybridized. The absence of genes as established with microarrays, was confirmed by PCR. Compared with the Tohama I strain, Finnish isolates lost 7 (8.6 kb) to 49 (55.3 kb) genes, clustered in one to four distinct loci. The number of lost genes increased with time, and one third of lost genes had functions related to inorganic ion transport and metabolism, or energy production and conversion. All four loci of lost genes were flanked by the insertion sequence element IS481. Conclusion/Significance Our results showed that the progressive gene loss occurred in Finnish B. pertussis strains isolated during a period of 50 years and confirmed that B. pertussis is dynamic and is continuously evolving, suggesting that the bacterium may use gene loss as one strategy to adapt to highly immunized populations.
Deep-Crowd-Label: A deep-learning based crowd-assisted system for location labeling

Semantic labels are crucial parts of many location-based applications. Previous efforts in location-based systems have mostly paid attention to achieve high accuracy in localization or navigation, with the assumption that the mapping between the locations and the semantic labels are given or will be done manually. In this paper, we propose a system called Deep-Crowd-Label that automatically assigns semantic labels to locations. We propose a novel transfer learning method that leverages deep learning models deployed on many crowd-workers to assign semantic labels to locations by classifying associated visual data. Deep-Crowd-Label uses the power of the crowd to aggregate the individual predictions done by the model across the crowd-workers visiting the same location. Our preliminary experiments with 26 different types of locations show that, our method and our prototype system is able to find the right label for the locations i.e., coffee shop to the Starbucks.
Effect of Laser Welding Parameters on Forming Behavior of Tailor Welded Blanks

Tailor Welded Blanks (TWB) are blanks in which two or more sheets of similar or dissimilar materials, thicknesses, coatings etc. are welded together to form a single sheet before forming. Forming behavior of TWBs is affected by thickness ratio, strength ratio, weld conditions such as weld properties, weld orientation, weld location etc. In this work, Nd:YAG laser welding will be use to weld TWB with different thickness in experimental test. Nd:YAG laser welding parameters such as pulse duration, welding velocity, frequency and peak power will affect formability of TWBs. Taguchis design of experiments methodology is followed to design of experiment and obtain the percentage contribution of factors considered. Erichsen formability test and uniaxial tensile test (ASTM-E8) will be use in experiment setup to compare result of different welding parameters on formability quality of TWBs.
Are semantic desktops better?: summative evaluation comparing a semantic against a conventional desktop

Semantic desktop environments aim at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of users carrying out daily tasks within their personal information management (PIM) infrastructure. They support the user by transferring and exploiting the explicit semantics of data items across different PIM applications. Whether such an approach does indeed reach its aim of facilitating users' life and--if so--to which extent, however, remains an open question. In this paper we address this question with the first summative evaluation of a semantic desktop. We have developed a test environment to evaluate two semantic PIM applications against standard PIM tools. As result, we have found significant efficiency and satisfaction improvements for typical PIM tasks.
Structured MMSE equalization for synchronous CDMA with sparse multipath channels

We present chip-level MMSE equalizers for the forward link in CDMA that exploit the underlying channel structure, specifically the fact that the channel impulse response is sparse. The assumption we make is that the channel vector lies in the subspace associated with the pulse shaping filter convolution matrix. We can then project the chip-level MMSE equalizers onto a much lower dimensional subspace due to the sparseness of the channel. The simulations demonstrate that this low-rank MMSE equalizer converges very quickly to the asymptotic SINR, even where the underlying assumption is not valid.
Microarray Expression Analysis Using Seed-Based Clustering Method

Clustering methods have been often used to find biologically relevant groups of genes or conditions based on their expression levels. Since many functionally related genes tend to be coexpressed, by identifying groups of genes with similar expression profiles, the functionalities of unknown genes can be inferred from those of known genes in the same group. In this paper we address a novel clustering approach, called seed-based clustering, where seed genes are first systematically chosen by computational analysis of their expression profiles, and then the clusters are generated by using the seed genes as initial values for k-means clustering. The seed-based clustering method has strong mathematical foundations and requires only a few matrix computations for seed extraction. As a result, it provides stability of clustering results by eliminating randomness in the selection of initial values for cluster generation. Our empirical results reported here indicate that the entire clustering process can be systematically pursued using seedbased clustering, and that its performance is favorable compared to current approaches.
The controversy on screening for intimate partner violence: a question of semantics?

In this paper, we review the basis of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's recommendations related to routine screening for intimate partner violence (IPV), focus on two of the arguments of those who have rejected these recommendations, and based on these, suggest that this controversy has occurred, in part, as a result of different interpretations of the meaning of "screening. " We differentiate screening from situations in which asking about IPV is essential for differential diagnosis, that is, exploring exposure to IPV when there are signs and symptoms that might result from this exposure. Finally, we describe the randomized, controlled trial CDC is conducting to contribute to the evidence the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force requries to make its recommendations.
Involvement of Antilipoarabinomannan Antibodies in Classical Complement Activation in Tuberculosis

ABSTRACT We examined alternative and classical complement activation induced by whole bacilli of Mycobacterium bovis BCG andMycobacterium tuberculosis products. After exposure to BCG, there were higher levels of the terminal complement complex in sera from Indian tuberculosis patients than in sera from healthy controls. The addition of BCG with or without EGTA to these sera indicated that approximately 70 to 85% of the total levels of the terminal complement complex was formed by classical activation. Sera from Indian tuberculosis patients contained more antibody to lipoarabinomannan (LAM) than sera from healthy Indians. Levels of anti-LAM immunoglobulin G2 (IgG2), but not anti-LAM IgM, correlated positively with classical activation induced by BCG in the sera. By flow cytometry, deposition of C3 and terminal complement complex on bacilli incubated with normal human serum was demonstrated. The anticomplement staining was significantly reduced in the presence of EGTA and EDTA. Flow cytometry also revealed the binding of complement to BCG incubated with rabbit anti-LAM and then with factor B-depleted serum. This indicates that classical activation plays a major role in complement activation induced by mycobacteria and that anti-LAM IgG on the bacilli can mediate this response. Classical complement activation may be important for the extent of phagocytosis of M. tuberculosis by mononuclear phagocytes, which may influence the course after infection.
The Effect of a Physical Activity Program on Decreasing Physical Disability Indicated by Musculoskeletal Pain and Related Symptoms Among Workers: A Pilot Study

The aim of this study was to verify the effect of a physical activity (PA) program on musculoskeletal pain and related symptoms in different body regions among workers. Methods. The intervention study lasted 6 months. The training sessions were given during work time. The intervention group (TOI) (n = 39) participated in 10–15 min of physical exercise training 3 times a week and focused on stretching exercises and general strength. The reference group (TOR) (n = 31) were asked to continue their daily activities. Musculoskeletal pain was assessed with the standardized Nordic questionnaires for analyzing musculoskeletal symptoms. Evaluations were performed at baseline and at the end of the intervention. Results. After the intervention, the TOI obtained some significant results regarding a decrease in the intensity of pain in some of the body regions evaluated, such as elbow (p = .03) and dorsal region (p = .015). In comparing the TOR and TOI after the 6 months of the PA program, we can verify that in the elbow and in the thigh/hip regions, the pain intensity decreased significantly; additionally, there is some evidence to suggest statistically significant results in the neck region (p = .063). Conclusion. Our intervention seems to have reduced musculoskeletal pain and related symptoms in factory workers.