Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proteomic Analysis of a Detergent-resistant Membrane Skeleton from Neutrophil Plasma Membranes* 210

Plasma membranes are organized into functional domains both by liquid-ordered packing into “lipid rafts,” structures that resist Triton extraction, and by attachments to underlying cytoskeletal proteins in assemblies called “membrane skeletons. ” Although the actin cytoskeleton is implicated in many lipid raft-mediated signaling processes, little is known about the biochemical basis for actin involvement. We show here that a subset of plasma membrane skeleton proteins from bovine neutrophils co-isolates with cholesterol-rich, detergent-resistant membrane fragments (DRMs) that exhibit a relatively high buoyant density in sucrose (DRM-H;d ∼1.16 g/ml). By using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight and tandem mass spectrometry, we identified 19 major DRM-H proteins. Membrane skeleton proteins include fodrin (nonerythroid spectrin), myosin-IIA, myosin-IG, α-actinin 1, α-actinin 4, vimentin, and the F-actin-binding protein, supervillin. Other DRM-H components include lipid raft-associated integral membrane proteins (stomatin, flotillin 1, and flotillin 2), extracellular surface-bound and glycophosphatidylinositol-anchored proteins (IgM, membrane-type 6 matrix metalloproteinase), and intracellular dually acylated signaling proteins (Lyn kinase, Gαi-2). Consistent with cytoskeletal association, most DRM-H-associated flotillin 2, Lyn, and Gαi-2 also resist extraction with 0.1 m octyl glucoside. Supervillin, myosin-IG, and myosin-IIA resist extraction with 0.1 m sodium carbonate, a treatment that removes all detectable actin, suggesting that these cytoskeletal proteins are proximal to the DRM-H bilayer. Binding of supervillin to the DRM-H fragments is confirmed by co-immunoaffinity purification. In spreading neutrophils, supervillin localizes with F-actin in cell extensions and in discrete basal puncta that partially overlap with Gαi staining. We suggest that the DRM-H fraction represents a membrane skeleton-associated subset of leukocyte signaling domains.
Distribución y conservación de Quercus oleoides Schltdl. & Cham. en la Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra del Abra Tanchipa

En la Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra del Abra Tanchipa, los encinares tropicales (Quercus oleoides) actúan como reguladores ambientales y son un recurso maderable valioso para los pobladores locales; sin embargo, las actividades antrópicas han afectado considerablemente estas comunidades vegetales. Los objetivos de este estudio fueron conocer la distribución actual y potencial de Quercus oleoides, sus usos actuales y definir áreas prioritarias para su conservación. Se llevó a cabo una revisión documental, se consultaron herbarios y realizó trabajo de campo, además de un análisis espacial basado en Sistemas de Información Geográfica y una modelización de la distribución potencial. La definición de sitios prioritarios se realizó mediante una evaluación multicriterio, con base en un análisis jerarquizado (AHP) y en el conocimiento de expertos. En la Reserva y en su área de influencia, Quercus oleoides tiene presencia relictual y dispersa a lo largo de la sierra. Su distribución está asociada principalmente a suelos delgados, pendientes suaves y elevaciones menores a 350 msnm. La superficie que podría haber ocupado esta comunidad vegetal es superior a 15 000 ha, pero la remoción de la cubierta original para dedicar los terrenos a actividades agropecuarias y el aprovechamiento irrestricto de la especie han causado una reducción crítica de sus poblaciones. Actualmente el área propicia para su conservación es de aproximadamente 200 ha, donde es posible iniciar acciones para su restauración y conservación.
Coded Strobing Photography : Compressive Sensing of High-speed Periodic Events

We show that, via temporal modulation, one can observe a high-speed periodic event well beyond the abiliti es of a low-frame rate camera. By strobing the exposure with unique sequences within the integration time of each frame, we take coded projections of dynamic events. From a sequence of such frames, we reconstruct a high-speed video of the high frequency periodic process. Strobing is used in entertainment, medical imaging and industrial inspection to generate lowe r beat frequencies. But this is limited to scenes with a detect able single dominant frequency and requires high-intensity lighting. In this paper, we address the problem of sub-Nyquist samplin g of periodic signals and show designs to capture and reconstruc t such signals. The key result is that for such signals the Nyquist r ate constraint can be imposed on strobe-rate rather than the sen sorrate. The technique is based on intentional aliasing of the f requency components of the periodic signal while the reconstr uction algorithm exploits recent advances in sparse representati ons and compressive sensing. We exploit the sparsity of periodic si gnals in Fourier domain to develop reconstruction algorithms that are inspired by compressive sensing.
Expression of Toll‐like receptor 9 and response to bacterial CpG oligodeoxynucleotides in human intestinal epithelium *

Recognition of repeat CpG motifs, which are common in bacterial, but not in mammalian, DNA, through Toll‐like receptor (TLR)9 is an integral part of the innate immune system. As the role of TLR9 in the human gut is unknown, we determined the spectrum of TLR9 expression in normal and inflamed colon and examined how epithelial cells respond to specific TLR9 ligand stimulation. TLR9 expresssion was measured in human colonic mucosal biopsies, freshly isolated human colonic epithelial cells and HT‐29 cells by reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction or Western blotting. Colonic epithelial cell cultures were stimulated with a synthetic CpG‐oligodeoxynucleotide (ODN), exhibiting strong immunostimulatory effects in B cells. Interleukin (IL)‐8 secretion was determined by enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay, nuclear factor‐kappaB (NF‐kB) activity by electrophoretic mobility shift assay and IkB phosphorylation by Western blotting. TLR9 mRNA was equally expressed in colonic mucosa from controls (n = 6) and patients with ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease disease (n = 13). HT‐29 cells expressed TLR9 mRNA and protein and responded to CpG‐ODN (P < 0·01), but not to non‐CpG‐ODN stimulation, by secreting IL‐8, apparently in the absence of NF‐kB activation. Primary epithelial cells isolated from normal human colon expressed TLR9 mRNA, but were completely unresponsive to CpG‐ODN stimulation in vitro. In conclusion, differentiated human colonic epithelial cells are unresponsive to TLR9 ligand stimulation in vitro despite spontaneous TLR9 gene expression. This suggests that the human epithelium is able to avoid inappropriate immune responses to luminal bacterial products through modulation of the TLR9 pathway.
Universal schemes for parallel communication

In this paper we isolate a combinatorial problem that, we believe, lies at the heart of this question and provide some encouragingly positive solutions to it. We show that there exists an N-processor <underline>realistic</underline> computer that can simulate arbitrary <underline>idealistic</underline> N-processor parallel computations with only a factor of O(log N) loss of runtime efficiency. The main innovation is an O(log N) time randomized routing algorithm. Previous approaches were based on sorting or permutation networks, and implied loss factors of order at least (log N)<supscrpt>2</supscrpt>.
IDENTIFICATION OF MEASUREMENT ITEMS OF DESIGN REQUIREMENTS FOR LEAN AND AGILE SUPPLY CHAIN-CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS

This study examines the consistency approaches by confirmatory factor analysis that determines the construct validity, convergent validity, construct reliability and internal consistency of the items of strategic design requirements. The design requirements includes use of information technology, sourcing procedures, new product development, flexible manufacturing functions and demand management supply chain net work design, management, commitment and inventory management policies among manufacturers of volatile and unforeseeable products in Andhra Pradesh, India. This study suggested that the seven factor model with 20 items of the leagile supply chain design requirements had a good fit. Further, the study showed a valid and reliable measurement to identify critical items among the design requirements of leagile supply chains.
TCN: Transferable Coupled Network for Cross-Resolution Face Recognition*

Cross-resolution face recognition (CRFR) aims to learn the matching of a low-resolution (LR) probe image with a database of high-resolution (HR) gallery images. Existing methods including super resolution and projection-based algorithms are not recognition-oriented and computationally expensive, or ignore the inter-class associations across resolutions. To address the issues, we propose a novel end-to-end Transferable Coupled Network (TCN) for CRFR. Specifically, the TCN consists of two networks for the HR and LR domains, respectively. To reduce the resolution mismatch, a transferrable triple loss (TTL) is introduced to pull together cross-resolution positive pairs (intra-class) and also enforce margins towards negative ones (inter-class) from both domains. Besides, to keep stability and faster convergence, a novel online triplet selection method is proposed. Empirically, the proposed TCN model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods among various low resolutions and architectures on public LFW and SCFace benchmarks.
How does human interest modeling help in computer vision: Tracking-by-saliency in unconstrained social videos

Sample quality plays an important role in tracking-by-learning strategies, but the reliable online samples are hard to be obtained due to challenges of variational environments. By modeling how human visual interest actively guiding the seek of salient regions and movements in video sequences, in this paper, a compositional tracking strategy is proposed based on an integrated saliency map, which is able to accurately guide the process of online samples generation. Meanwhile, a segmentation based refinement method is also proposed for effective model updating. With a high performance kernelized correlation filter, the proposed tracking can efficiently handle the complex intrinsic and extrinsic appearance changes. Experiments on challenging benchmark databases demonstrate that the robust accuracy of the proposed tracking against with the other state-of-the-art trackers.
Computing Iceberg Queries Eeciently Paper Number 234

Many applications compute aggregate functions (such as COUNT, SUM) over an attribute (or set of attributes) to nd aggregate values above some speci ed threshold. We call such queries iceberg queries because the number of above-threshold results is often very small (the tip of an iceberg), relative to the large amount of input data (the iceberg). Such iceberg queries are common in many applications, including data warehousing, information-retrieval, market basket analysis in data mining, clustering and copy detection. We propose e cient algorithms to evaluate iceberg queries using very little memory and signi cantly fewer passes over data, as compared to current techniques that use sorting or hashing. We present an experimental case study using over three gigabytes of Web data to illustrate the savings obtained by our algorithms.
Toward Optimal Resource Provisioning for Cloud MapReduce and Hybrid Cloud Applications

Given the variety of resources available in public clouds and locally (hybrid clouds), it can be very difficult to determine the best number and type of resources to allocate (and where) for a given activity. In order to solve this problem we first define the requested computation in terms of an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and then use an efficient ILP solver to make a provisioning decision in a few milliseconds. Our approach is based on the two most important metrics for the user: cost and job execution time. Thus, based on the user's preferences we can favor solutions that optimize speed or cost or a certain combination of both (e.g. Cheapest solution that meets a certain deadline). We evaluate our approach with two classes of cloud applications: MapReduce applications, and Monte Carlo simulations. A significant advantage in our approach is that our solution has been proved optimal by the ILP solver, the set of the scheduling decisions based on our model are plotted on a time vs. Cost graph that forms a Pareto efficient frontier. This way, we can avoid the pitfalls of a naïve strategy that can lead to a great increase in cost (91%) or job running time (21%) compared to optimal.
A graphical approach to incident energy analysis

The goal of an incident energy analysis is to determine the largest incident energy that a worker could be exposed to at a piece of electrical equipment. This is most commonly done using the IEEE 1584 method. It is a common observation when performing this analysis that minor variations in fault current can result in large changes in a protective device's operating time and the resulting incident energy. This would not be a problem if it was possible to remove all errors from the bolted fault calculation and the arcing fault calculation. Unfortunately, the arcing fault current calculation has some margin of error and the data used in arc flash models is often estimated. A graphical approach to determining the incident energy circumvents these problems and ensures that the worst-case incident energy is determined. This graphical approach is derived from graphs of incident energy based on protective device time current curves. An examination of the resultant graphs reveals a few maximums in the incident energy curve. These maximums are caused by the protective devices curve, the minimum and maximum arcing fault currents, and any time limitations that are applied. As a result, the locations of these maximums are easily predicted allowing the maximum incident energy to be determined by performing the IEEE 1584 calculation at a few key current values.
Data mining case study: modeling the behavior of offenders who commit serious sexual assaults

This paper looks at the use of a Self Organizing Map (SOM), to link of records of crimes of serious sexual attacks. Once linked a profile can be derived of the offender(s) responsible.The data was drawn from the major crimes database at the National Crime Faculty of the National Police Staff College Bramshill UK. The data was encoded from text by a small team of specialists working to a well-defined protocol. The encoded data was analyzed using SOMs. Two exercises were conducted. These resulted in the linking of several offences in to clusters each of which were sufficiently similar to have possibly been committed by the same offender(s). A number of clusters were used to form profiles of offenders. Some of these profiles were confirmed by independent analysts as either belonging to known offenders or appeared sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation.The prototype was developed over 10 weeks. This contrasts with an in-house study using a conventional approach, which took 2 years to reach similar results. As a consequence of this study the NCF intends to pursue an in-depth follow up study.
Evaluation of Superficial Oral Squamous Cell Malignancy Based on Morphometry and Immunoexpression of Cytokeratin 13 and Cytokeratin 17

Objective: Evaluation of combined morphometry and immunoexpression of cytokeratin 13 (CK13) and cytokeratin 17 (CK17) for cytological identification of superficial oral squamous cells. Study Design: Smears from 11 tongue squamous cell carcinoma patients were processed by liquid-based cytology, stained via the Papanicolaou method and divided into multiple specimens by cell transfer. Morphometric indices, including nuclear area, nuclear perimeter, nuclear circular rate, largest-to-smallest dimension ratio of the nucleus and nucleocytoplasmic ratio, were measured using a computerized analysis system. CK13 and CK17 were detected by immunostaining. Morphometric values were compared between cell populations with distinct staining and immunoexpression patterns. Results: Most orange G-stained superficial cells were negative for CK13 (99.4%) and CK17 (98.6%). For light green-stained superficial cells, loss of CK13 was associated with greater cellular atypia in the nuclear area, nuclear perimeter and nucleocytoplasmic ratio (p < 0.01), while expression of CK17 was related to higher-grade cellular atypia in the same parameters (p < 0.01) as well as the nuclear circular rate (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Immunoexpression of CK13 and CK17 in light green-stained superficial cells was associated with more severe morphological atypia. Combined morphometry and immunoexpression of CK13 and CK17 might be useful for cytological diagnosis of this cell population.
Fitting heavy-tailed HTTP traces with the new stratified EM-algorithm

A typical step in the model-based evaluation of communication systems is to fit measured data to analytically tractable distributions. Due to the increased speed of today's networks, even basic measurements, such as logging the requests at a Web server, can quickly generate large data traces with millions of entries. Employing complex fitting algorithms on such traces can take a significant amount of time. In this paper, we focus on the Expectation Maximization-based fitting of heavy- tailed distributed data to hyper-exponential distributions. We present a data aggregation algorithm which accelerates the fitting by several orders of magnitude. The employed aggregation algorithm has been derived from a sampling stratification technique and adapts dynamically to the distribution of the data. We illustrate the performance of the algorithm by applying it to empirical and artificial data traces.
Human Pharmaceuticals, Antioxidants, and Plasticizers in Wastewater Treatment Plant and Water Reclamation Plant Effluents

The primary objective of this study was to determine the presence of unregulated organic chemicals in reclaimed water using complementary targeted and broad spectrum approaches. Eleven of 12 targeted human pharmaceuticals, antioxidants, and plasticizers, and 27 tentatively identified non‐target organic chemicals, were present in secondary effluent entering tertiary treatment trains at a wastewater treatment plant and two water reclamation facilities. The removal of these compounds by three different tertiary treatment trains was investigated: coagulant‐assisted granular media filtration (California Title‐22 water, 22 CCR §§60301‐60357; Barclay [2006]), lime clarification/reverse osmosis (lime/RO), and microfiltration‐reverse osmosis (MF/RO). Carbamazepine, clofibric acid, gemfibrozil, ibuprofen, p‐toluenesulfonamide, caffeine, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), and N‐butyl benzenesulfonamide (N‐BBSA) were present at low to high nanogram‐per‐liter levels in Title 22 water. The lime/RO product waters contained lower concentrations of clofibric acid, ibuprofen, caffeine, BHA, and N‐BBSA (<10 to 71 ng/L) than their Title 22 counterparts. The MF/RO treatment reduced concentrations to levels below their detection limits, although BHT was present in MF/RO product water from one facility. The presence of the target analytes in two surface waters used as raw drinking water sources and a recharged groundwater was also examined. Surface waters used as raw drinking water sources contained caffeine, BHA, BHT, and N‐BBSA, while recharged groundwater contained BHT, BHA, and N‐BBSA. Nontarget compounds in recharged groundwater appeared to be attenuated with increased residence time in the aquifer.
Cells- Role Of Receptor Activity Modifying Protein-3

Receptor activity modifying protein-3 (RAMP-3) has been shown to complex with the calcitonin receptor-like receptor establishing a functional receptor for adrenomedullin (AM). AM exhibits potent anti-proliferative and anti-migratory effects on rat mesangial cells (RMC). In this study we investigated the effect of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) on RAMP-3 expression in RMC. We show here that PDGF-BB stimulates RAMP-3 mRNA expression in a concentration-dependent manner. Pre-treatment with actinomycin-D and α-amanitin demonstrates that this effect is independent of new RNA synthesis. Furthermore, PDGF increased the half-life of RAMP-3 mRNA from 66.5 to 331.6 min. Using selective inhibitors, our results also indicate that the increase in RAMP3 mRNA is MAPKK/MAPK and p38 MAPK dependent. PDGF also caused a corresponding elevation in membrane-associated RAMP-3 protein. Associated with this increase, PDGF pretreatment led to a significantly higher AM-mediated adenylate cyclase activity, suggesting a functional consequence for the PDGF-induced increase in RAMP-3 expression. Taken together, these data identify PDGF-dependent regulation of RAMP-3 expression as a possible mechanism for modulating mesangial cell’s responsiveness to AM.
An empirical study of using planning poker for user story estimation

Group estimation of user stories is an important part of extreme programming (XP), used for both planning releases and iterations. Research has shown that although group estimation in many cases is superior to individual estimation, there is still room for improvement. For instance, group estimation performance can be reduced by dominant personalities and anchoring effects. Through the analysis of 101 user story estimates, made by an XP team for release planning, we investigate whether the introduction of the planning poker estimation process improved the estimation ability of the team. The results show that planning poker improved the team's estimation performance in most cases, but that it increased estimation error in the extreme cases
Comparative Study of Taste Substance Sensing by Liquid Membrane Oscillator and Electrochemical Systems With All-Solid-State Electrodes

In food industry, different types of sensors are used for characterizing and quantifying taste substances. Therefore, it is important to establish the principal advantages and disadvantages of these sensors for optimal application. In this paper, two possible systems are compared for sensing the four fundamental tastes: sour (citric acid), salty (sodium chloride), sweet (sucrose), and bitter (caffeine or quinine hydrochloride). One system is a bulk liquid membrane oscillator containing benzyldimethyltetradecylammonium chloride surfactant present during its transport in nitrobenzene membrane phase. The other system is based on all-solid–state electrode (ASSE) containing the same surfactant dissolved in polymer support. It was shown that the liquid membrane oscillator is significantly more sensitive to the presence of taste substances than the ASSE III system. Unfortunately, the functioning characteristics of this oscillator prevent it from steady, repetitive application in food quality control. On the other hand, ASSE III system shows remarkable stability on the long run. It was also found that a system composed of several ASSEs III, each containing different lipid compound, can distinguish successfully substances belonging to different taste classes. The obtained results suggest that such ASSEs III system can be used for food analysis.