Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unusually Long Palindromes Are Abundant in Mitochondrial Control Regions of Insects and Nematodes

Background Palindromes are known to be involved in a variety of biological processes. In the present investigation we carried out a comprehensive analysis of palindromes in the mitochondrial control regions (CRs) of several animal groups to study their frequency, distribution and architecture to gain insights into the origin of replication of mtDNA. Methodology/Principal Findings Many species of Arthropoda, Nematoda, Mollusca and Annelida harbor palindromes and inverted repeats (IRs) in their CRs. Lower animals like cnidarians and higher animal groups like chordates are almost devoid of palindromes and IRs. The study revealed that palindrome occurrence is positively correlated with the AT content of CRs, and that IRs are likely to give rise to longer palindromes. Conclusions/Significance The present study attempts to explain possible reasons and gives in silico evidence for absence of palindromes and IRs from CR of vertebrate mtDNA and acquisition and retention of the same in insects. Study of CRs of different animal phyla uncovered unique architecture of this locus, be it high abundance of long palindromes and IRs in CRs of Insecta and Nematoda, or short IRs of 10–20 nucleotides with a spacer region of 12–14 bases in subphylum Chelicerata, or nearly complete of absence of any long palindromes and IRs in Vertebrata, Cnidaria and Echinodermata.
Assessing phonologies in bilingual Swedish-Arabic children with and without language impairment

Ten Swedish-Arabic children with severe language impairment (LI) and 10 matched controls were tested with Swedish and Arabic phonology tests. The children with severe LI displayed significantly more of both syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes in both languages. The results are also discussed in relation to monolingual children in Swedish and Arabic, both children with a normal language development as well as with a language impairment. Both groups of Swedish-Arabic children tended to develop their two languages in the same way as monolingual children in each language, with some exceptions. Both groups had substantial lexical problems, especially in Arabic. Exposure to Swedish was an important variable relative to number of syntagmatic processes. The importance of assessing both languages is emphasized.
Creativity Under Concurrent and Sequential Task Conditions

Two experiments were conducted to investigate creativity for realistic divergent thinking problems, under concurrent and sequential task conditions (CTC and STC, respectively). Creativity was judged on divergence, novelty, appropriateness, and fluency of solutions. Results of Experiment I revealed that creativity was significantly higher under CTC than under STC. Embedded Figures Test was employed to rule out a possible alternative explanation that better performance under CTC is due to difference in creative potential between individuals participating under the two task conditions. Experiment II employed a control group to investigate whether difference in creative performance under the two conditions is due to a facilitation effect or a distraction effect, as compared to the control condition. Results showed a significant distraction effect under STC, and indicated, though not significant, a facilitation effect under CTC. Findings are understood in light of the associative theories of creativity, which highlight the role of attentional mechanisms in the creative process. Some indexes for measuring creative performance on realistic divergent thinking tasks are validated against conventional measures.
The Study of South Asian Religion in the 1980s

With Ramjanambhumi and Babri Masjid before us, and the Golden Temple and Anuradhapura not far away, we need hardly be reminded of the importance of religion in contemporary South Asia. In such a context we may be inclined to think of religion as a mark of ethnic identity, which places a person on one or the other side of a conflict whose real motives are not religious but political or economic. We may have learnt from Radhakrishnan and others that true religion is not concerned with places of pilgrimage or with communal conflicts, so that such conflicts are not truly religious. Yet, from a traditional South Asian point of view, such a refined
The SMO Project: A Submarine Multidisciplinary Observatory in Deep-Sea

The SMO (Submarine Multidisciplinary Observatory) project aims at performing multidisciplinary studies in deep-sea based on acoustic detection. SMO will be a 3D array of 18 broad-band (10Hz - 70kHz) hydrophones installed at 3500m water depth. Deployment is foreseen in the beginning of 2012 and operation will continue for several years. The height of the array will be about 400m. SMO will be directly connected to shore though an electro-optical cable. Hydrophones will be sampled at 192kHz/24 bit underwater, all sensors will be phased and synchronized with a common master clock from shore. A novel technology for underwater GPS time-stamp of data was implemented and tested. Data from deep-sea will be available to the science community in real-time. SMO will be mainly addressed to detection of bioacoustic sounds (marine mammals), acoustic environmental monitoring, tests of novel tsunami detection technique and studies on acoustic neutrino detection. The status and goals of the project will be presented.
Light pollution alters the phenology of dawn and dusk singing in common European songbirds

Artificial night lighting is expanding globally, but its ecological consequences remain little understood. Animals often use changes in day length as a cue to time seasonal behaviour. Artificial night lighting may influence the perception of day length, and may thus affect both circadian and circannual rhythms. Over a 3.5 month period, from winter to breeding, we recorded daily singing activity of six common songbird species in 12 woodland sites, half of which were affected by street lighting. We previously reported on analyses suggesting that artificial night lighting affects the daily timing of singing in five species. The main aim of this study was to investigate whether the presence of artificial night lighting is also associated with the seasonal occurrence of dawn and dusk singing. We found that in four species dawn and dusk singing developed earlier in the year at sites exposed to light pollution. We also examined the effects of weather conditions and found that rain and low temperatures negatively affected the occurrence of dawn and dusk singing. Our results support the hypothesis that artificial night lighting alters natural seasonal rhythms, independently of other effects of urbanization. The fitness consequences of the observed changes in seasonal timing of behaviour remain unknown.
Oligomerization of the UvrB Nucleotide Excision Repair Protein of Escherichia coli *

A combination of hydrodynamic and cross-linking studies were used to investigate self-assembly of the Escherichia coli DNA repair protein UvrB. Though the procession of steps leading to incision of DNA at sites flanking damage requires that UvrB engage in an ordered series of complexes, successively with UvrA, DNA, and UvrC, the potential for self-association had not yet been reported. Gel permeation chromatography, nondenaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, and chemical cross-linking results combine to show that UvrB stably assembles as a dimer in solution at concentrations in the low micromolar range. Smaller populations of higher order oligomeric species are also observed. Unlike the dimerization of UvrA, an initial step promoted by ATP binding, the monomer-dimer equilibrium for UvrB is unaffected by the presence of ATP. The insensitivity of cross-linking efficiency to a 10-fold variation in salt concentration further suggests that UvrB self-assembly is driven largely by hydrophobic interactions. Self-assembly is significantly weakened by proteolytic removal of the carboxyl terminus of the protein (generating UvrB*), a domain also known to be required for the interaction with UvrC leading to the initial incision of damaged DNA. This suggests that the C terminus may be a multifunctional binding domain, with specificity regulated by protein conformation.
Alignment templates: the RWTH SMT system

In this paper, we describe the RWTH statistical machine translation (SMT) system which is based on log-linear model combination. All knowledge sources are treated as feature functions which depend on the source language sentence, the target language sentence and possible hidden variables. The main feature of our approach are the alignment templates which take shallow phrase structures into account: a phrase level alignment between phrases and a word level alignment between single words within the phrases. Thereby, we directly consider word contexts and local reorderings. In order to incorporate additional models (the IBM-1 statistical lexicon model, a word deletion model, and higher order language models), we perform n-best list rescoring. Participating in the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2004), we evaluate our system on the Basic Travel Expression Corpus (BTEC) Chinese-to-English and Japanese-to-English tasks.
Distinct Effects of Dexamethasone on Human Natural Killer Cell Responses Dependent on Cytokines

Glucocorticoids (GCs) have long been known to be immune suppressive and synthetic variants are widely used in the treatment of inflammatory disorders. Here, we report that, while suppressing the initial production of interferon-γ (IFN-γ), the synthetic GC dexamethasone (Dex) enhances the proliferation and survival of natural killer (NK) cells stimulated with interleukin-2 (IL-2) + interleukin-12 (IL-12). Inhibition of mTOR complex 1 by rapamycin revealed the immunosuppressive activity of Dex was independent from the effect of enhancing NK cell proliferation. In the presence of IL-2 + IL-12, Dex also increased the percentage of NK cells that were CD16+ and DNAM1bright, increased the level of expression of CD94 or NKG2A, and improved mitochondrial function of NK cells. Moreover, NK cells treated with cytokines IL-2 and IL-12 + Dex, followed by a 7-day rest, displayed an increased IFN-γ response upon restimulation. Thus, there is a dichotomic effect of GCs on NK cell function dependent on the local cytokine milieu; the NK cell effector response is initially suppressed, but, dependent on the cytokines present, Dex can also augment the proliferation, survival, and reactivity of human NK cells in a secondary recall response.
Agents that L earn to

In this paper we present an intelligent, personalised TV recommender system with an agent based infrastructure that provides the user both with content based and collaborative recommendations based on the user’s viewing profile, which is our model of the user. We represent the viewing profile using separate categories of interest such as dramas and game shows, where each category in turn is made up of programs that the user liked and disliked. The profile is continuously updated via feedback to the viewers agent. The liked and disliked programs are then distilled into a weighted tuple of key words produced from their descriptions. This weighted tuple is then used to make recommendations based on the descriptions of new programs. Programs whose descriptions are ’close’ to the user’s liked profile for some category are recommended.
Self-esteem, Social Inclusionary Status, and Inhibition of Rejection

Two studies examined the activation of acceptance and rejection cognitions following inclusion and exclusion for high self-esteem (HSEs) and low self-esteem individuals (LSEs). In Study 1, participants were primed with inclusion and exclusion words via words on a computer screen, whereas, in Study 2, participants were included or excluded from a laboratory work group. In both studies, participants completed a lexical decision task (LDT) with acceptance and rejection words as the targets of interest. We found that HSEs inhibited thoughts of rejection following both exclusion and inclusion; they were slower at recognizing rejection words following inclusion and exclusion primes compared to control primes. For LSEs, we found that rejection and acceptance words were equally accessible across prime conditions suggesting that they are vigilant for signs related to how others view them across situations.
Development of robust/predictive control strategies for image-guided ablative treatments using a minimally invasive ultrasound applicator

Abstract Purpose: One important challenge in image-guided ablative therapies is the effect of heat diffusion which can cause damage to surrounding organs and limit the ability to achieve a conformal pattern of thermal damage. Furthermore, tissue properties such as perfusion and energy absorption can be dynamic and difficult to measure. This paper attempts to address these problems by proposing new control methods. Materials and methods: A novel predictive approach was developed to compensate for the effect of heat diffusion using a minimally invasive rotating ultrasound heating applicator for ablative therapy. This method can be merged into any closed-loop control strategy. A binary controller, a previously developed adaptive proportional-integral controller, and a model reference adaptive controller were employed and compared, all with the predictive element incorporated. The reason for choosing these controllers was that none of them needed a model of the tissue or exact values of their parameters. Results: The effectiveness of these controllers was demonstrated through both simulation and experimental studies. The results were consistent and demonstrated equivalent performance between controllers. Conclusions: The dominant influence on radial targeting accuracy was the prediction element described in this paper. A binary controller with a predictive element may provide the best balance of performance and simplicity for this application.
Cross-language Projection of Dependency Trees with Constrained Partial Parsing for Tree-to-Tree Machine Translation

Tree-to-tree machine translation (MT) that utilizes syntactic parse trees on both source and target sides suffers from the non-isomorphism of the parse trees due to parsing errors and the difference of annotation criterion between the two languages. In this paper, we present a method that projects dependency parse trees from the language side that has a high quality parser, to the side that has a low quality parser, to improve the isomorphism of the parse trees. We ﬁrst project a part of the dependencies with high conﬁdence to make a partial parse tree, and then complement the remaining dependencies with partial parsing constrained by the already projected dependencies. MT experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
CRIM‐positive mutations of acute intermittent porphyria in Finland

Acute intermittent porphyria (AIP) is a dominantly inherited metabolic disease caused by a partial deficiency of the third enzyme, porphobilinogen deaminase (PBGD), in the heme biosynthetic pathway. AIP has been divided into two subtypes according to the ratio of enzyme polypeptide concentration and enzyme activity measured in erythrocytes: cross‐reacting immunologic material (CRIM) positive or negative. In this study six out of the seven known CRIM‐positive AIP families in Finland were analyzed and two also previously identified mutations in the PBGD gene were found to be responsible for AIP in this genetically isolated population. The search for mutations was focused on exon 10 based on previously found mutations. SSCP analysis revealed a known polymorphism but the two mutations in that region were found only by direct sequencing of the PCR products. A G518 → A substitution changing Arg173 to Gln was found in three families and a C499 → T substitution changing Arg167 to Trp was detected in three families. DNA analyses of the family members revealed that conventional assays of erythrocyte PBGD activity identified correctly only 72% of the carriers for the AIP mutation. © 1992 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Intramolecular vibrational redistribution in aromatic molecules. I. Eigenstate resolved CH stretch first overtone spectra of benzene

We have used infrared–infrared double resonance spectroscopy to record a rovibrational eigenstate resolved spectrum of benzene in the region of the CH stretch first overtone. This experiment is the first of a series aimed at investigating intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) in aromatic molecules. The experiment has been carried out in a supersonic molecular beam apparatus using bolometric detection. A tunable resonant cavity was used to enhance the on-beam intensity of the 1.5 μm color center laser used to pump the overtone, and a fixed frequency [R(30)] 13CO2 laser was used to saturate the coinciding ν18 rQ(2) transition of benzene. After assigning the measured lines of the highly IVR fractionated spectrum to their respective rotational quantum number J, analysis of the data reveals that the dynamics occurs on several distinct time scales and is dominated by anharmonic coupling with little contribution from Coriolis coupling. After the fast (∼100 fs) redistribution of the energy among .
“It Changed Our Lives”: Activism, Science, and Greening the Community

Drawing upon critically oriented studies of science literacy and environmental justice, we posit a framework for activism in science education. To make our case, we share a set of narratives on how the River City Youth Club acquired a new green roof. Using these narratives we argue that the ways in which youth describe their accomplishments with respect to the roof reflects a range of subject positions that they carve out and take up over time. These subject positions reveal how activism is a generative process linked to “knowing” and “being” in ways that juxtapose everyday practices with those of science. RésuméFondant notre approche sur des études critiques dans le domaine de l’alphabétisation scientifique et de l’équité environnementale, nous postulons un cadre visant à promouvoir l’activisme en enseignement des sciences. Comme arguments, nous présentons une série de récits qui racontent comment la Maison de jeunes de River City a pu se doter d’un nouveau toit écologique. Ces récits nous permettent de montrer que les façons dont les jeunes décrivent leur rôle dans la réalisation de ce projet reflètent une gamme de positions que les sujets adoptent et modifient au fur et à mesure que progresse la réalisation du toit. Ces différentes positions indiquent que l’activisme est un processus génératif lié à la ‘connaissance’ et au ‘savoir’, processus qui juxtapose les pratiques quotidiennes et celles des sciences.
Whole-body motion imitation using human modeling

The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology that enables a humanoid robot to imitate a whole body motion of a human. In the communication and interaction with a human being with motions and gestures, a humanoid robot needs not only to look like a human but to behave as a human does to make sure the meanings of motions and gestures. To act like a human, the humanoid robot has to imitate the kinematical and dynamical movement of human. For this, a methodology for a humanoid robot to imitate human whole body motions, is presented. Human motions are acquired from a motion capture system. The proposed methodology first converts the captured motions into the motions for a humanoid robot considering kinematical differences between human and robot. In addition, the methodology proposes a simplified human model to analyze a human ZMP trajectory using an optimization scheme. The methodology computes a stable ZMP trajectory for the humanoid robot based the ZMP trajectory of this simplified human model. From the computed ZMP trajectory, the whole body motion for the humanoid robot is generated through this off-line process. A human whole body motion, a dancing motion, is converted to examine the developed methodology.
A Blueprint for Skills Assessment in Higher Education

The following paper has as its basis a series of workshop presentations already made to colleagues at over 20 universities. At these, its core findings have been outlined, discussed and refined. Drawing on original work by a Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning Project studying assessment for students of languages, it proposes a blueprint for the separate and explicit assessment of transferable skills. It is suggested that this approach to transferable skills assessment is valid for subjects other than languages and could be adopted more widely across the higher education curriculum.
Structural health monitoring of smart civil structures based on fiber Bragg grating sensing technology

The real-time monitoring technologies of smart civil structure using fiber Bragg grating (FBG), including the wavelength demodulation technology of FBG, are researched extensively at home and abroad. To improve the accuracy of demodulation system of FBG sensors, based on a fiber comb filter, a wavelength-demodulation method of FBG was proposed and an experiment platform was designed to demodulate the FBG wavelength for smart civil structure. The reinforced concrete embedded fiber Bragg gratings became the intelligent civil structure on which the experiment of structural health monitoring was done. Experimental results show that, based on a fiber comb filter, the FBG wavelength demodulation method can be used to demodulate the FBG wavelength with high speed and high precision, which can be used extensively in large-scale multipoint monitor engineering. During the experiment, the fiber Bragg gratings embedded in reinforced concrete show good sensing properties, and can respond rapidly to strain with a stable performance.
Coimpairments as Predictors of Severe Walking Disability in Older Women

OBJECTIVE: Severe disabilities are common among older people who have impairments in a range of physiologic systems. It is not known, however, whether the presence of multiple impairments, or coimpairments, is associated with increased risk of developing new disability. The aim of this study was to determine the combined effects of two impairments, decreased knee‐extension strength and poor standing balance, on the risk of developing severe walking disability among older, moderately‐to‐severely disabled women who did not have severe walking disability at baseline.
Examining Circle of Security™

The Circle of Security™ interventions are psychosocial treatments intended to increase maternal sensitivity and thus child attachment security in infants and young children. A small number of publications have reported empirical research on outcomes of these treatments. This article reviews the research evidence, plausibility, theoretical background, and generalizability of Circle of Security, and concludes that these interventions are plausible emerging treatments, presently weakly supported by research evidence, but potentially able to receive support from further research. The commercialization of Circle of Security is discussed as a possible obstacle to independent research. The current level of research support is described as similar to support for other interventions for young children.