Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SlMAPK3 enhances tolerance to tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) by regulating salicylic acid and jasmonic acid signaling in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum)

Several recent studies have reported on the role of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK3) in plant immune responses. However, little is known about how MAPK3 functions in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) infected with tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV). There is also uncertainty about the connection between plant MAPK3 and the salicylic acid (SA) and jasmonic acid (JA) defense-signaling pathways. The results of this study indicated that SlMAPK3 participates in the antiviral response against TYLCV. Tomato seedlings were inoculated with TYLCV to investigate the possible roles of SlMAPK1, SlMAPK2, and SlMAPK3 against this virus. Inoculation with TYLCV strongly induced the expression and the activity of all three genes. Silencing of SlMAPK1, SlMAPK2, and SlMAPK3 reduced tolerance to TYLCV, increased leaf H2O2 concentrations, and attenuated expression of defense-related genes after TYLCV infection, especially in SlMAPK3-silenced plants. Exogenous SA and methyl jasmonic acid (MeJA) both significantly induced SlMAPK3 expression in tomato leaves. Over-expression of SlMAPK3 increased the transcript levels of SA/JA-mediated defense-related genes (PR1, PR1b/SlLapA, SlPI-I, and SlPI-II) and enhanced tolerance to TYLCV. After TYLCV inoculation, the leaves of SlMAPK3 over-expressed plants compared with wild type plants showed less H2O2 accumulation and greater superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), catalase (CAT), and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) activity. Overall, the results suggested that SlMAPK3 participates in the antiviral response of tomato to TYLCV, and that this process may be through either the SA or JA defense-signaling pathways.
Populating a cluster of galaxies - I. Results at z=0

ABSTRA C T We simulate the assembly of a massive rich cluster and the formation of its constituent galaxies in a flat, low-density universe. Our most accurate model follows the collapse, the star formation history and the orbital motion of all galaxies more luminous than the Fornax dwarf spheroidal, while dark halo structure is tracked consistently throughout the cluster for all galaxies more luminous than the SMC. Within its virial radius this model contains about 2 10 7 dark matter particles and almost 5000 distinct dynamically resolved galaxies. Simulations of this same cluster at a variety of resolutions allow us to check explicitly for numerical convergence both of the dark matter structures produced by our new parallel N-body and substructure identification codes, and of the galaxy populations produced by the phenomenological models we use to follow cooling, star formation, feedback and stellar aging. This baryonic modelling is tuned so that our simulations reproduce the observed properties of isolated spirals outside clusters. Without further parameter adjustment our simulations then produce a luminosity function, a mass-to-light ratio, luminosity, number and velocity dispersion profiles, and a morphology ‐radius relation which are similar to those observed in real clusters. In particular, since our simulations follow galaxy merging explicitly, we can demonstrate that it accounts quantitatively for the observed cluster population of bulges and elliptical galaxies.
Autonomy in the global era: Euro-regionalism and new policy spaces in education. ACES Working Papers, August 2010

Framed by a critical discussion of methodological nationalism, this paper explores the intersection of new and evolving regional, central state, and supranational education policy spaces through examples drawn from post-Franco Spain. This work is situated within the broader literature on the development of a European Education Policy Space, which aims to understand changing governance structures in European education (cf. Grek et al., 2009; Lawn & Lingard,2002; N6voa & Lawn, 2002). Using policy documents since 2000 and interview data, the paper first examines Spanish and regional (Catalan) education policy related to devolution, namely Catalonia's recently revised Statute of Autonomy. The paper then places devolution in Spain and Catalonia in a broader context of Euro-regionalism, which has deepened and legitimized regional autonomy. Together these shifts in educational governance and the development of new education policy spaces have promoted a concept of the multi-scalar, European "ideal citizen" (Engel & Ortloff, 2009). The last section presents an overview of the recent influx of immigrants into Catalonia and Spain, exploring whether and to what extent recent education policy promoting the "ideal citizen" has taken non-European immigrants into account.
Mono-camera person tracking based on template matching and covariance descriptor

This article presents a simple and efficient approach to persons tracking within large scale environment. The proposed approach is a point matching tracking algorithm based on a covariance descriptor. Object tracking, in general, is a challenging problem. Difficulties in tracking objects can arise due to abrupt object motion, changing appearance patterns of the object and the scene and partial and total occlusions. Tracking is usually performed in the context of higher-level applications that require the location and appearance of the object in every frame. Typically, assumptions are made to constrain the tracking problem in the context of a particular application. The ultimate purpose of the proposed approach is to propose an efficient tracking algorithm as a way for real time multi-shot re-identification. This approach is evaluated using standard datasets.
Assessments of Arterial Stiffness and Endothelial Function Using Pulse Wave Analysis

Conventionally, the assessments of endothelial function and arterial stiffness require different sets of equipment, making the inclusion of both tests impractical for clinical and epidemiological studies. Pulse wave analysis (PWA) provides useful information regarding the mechanical properties of the arterial tree and can also be used to assess endothelial function. PWA is a simple, valid, reliable, and inexpensive technique, offering great clinical and epidemiological potential. The current paper will outline how to measure arterial stiffness and endothelial function using this technique and include discussion of validity and reliability.
Wireless Routing and Control: A Cyber-Physical Case Study

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) are being adopted in process industries because of their advantages in lowering deployment and maintenance costs. While there has been significant theoretical advancement in networked control design, only limited empirical results that combine control design with realistic WSAN standards exist. This paper presents a cyber-physical case study on a wireless process control system that integrates state-of-the-art network control design and a WSAN based on the WirelessHART standard. The case study systematically explores the interactions between wireless routing and control design in the process control plant. The network supports alternative routing strategies, including single-path source routing and multi-path graph routing. To mitigate the effect of data loss in the WSAN, the control design integrates an observer based on an Extended Kalman Filter with a model predictive controller and an actuator buffer of recent control inputs. We observe that sensing and actuation can have different levels of resilience to packet loss under this network control design. We then propose a flexible routing approach where the routing strategy for sensing and actuation can be configured separately. Finally, we show that an asymmetric routing configuration with different routing strategies for sensing and actuation can effectively improve control performance under significant packet loss. Our results highlight the importance of co- joining the design of wireless network protocols and control in wireless control systems.
Oligonucleotide Array for Identification and Detection of Pythium Species

ABSTRACT A DNA array containing 172 oligonucleotides complementary to specific diagnostic regions of internal transcribed spacers (ITS) of more than 100 species was developed for identification and detection of Pythium species. All of the species studied, with the exception of Pythium ostracodes, exhibited a positive hybridization reaction with at least one corresponding species-specific oligonucleotide. Hybridization patterns were distinct for each species. The array hybridization patterns included cluster-specific oligonucleotides that facilitated the recognition of species, including new ones, belonging to groups such as those producing filamentous or globose sporangia. BLAST analyses against 500 publicly available Pythium sequences in GenBank confirmed that species-specific oligonucleotides were unique to all of the available strains of each species, of which there were numerous economically important ones. GenBank entries of newly described species that are not putative synonyms showed no homology to sequences of the spotted species-specific oligonucleotides, but most new species did match some of the cluster-specific oligonucleotides. Further verification of the specificity of the DNA array was done with 50 additional Pythium isolates obtained by soil dilution plating. The hybridization patterns obtained were consistent with the identification of these isolates based on morphology and ITS sequence analyses. In another blind test, total DNA of the same soil samples was amplified and hybridized on the array, and the results were compared to those of 130 Pythium isolates obtained by soil dilution plating and root baiting. The 13 species detected by the DNA array corresponded to the isolates obtained by a combination of soil dilution plating and baiting, except for one new species that was not represented on the array. We conclude that the reported DNA array is a reliable tool for identification and detection of the majority of Pythium species in environmental samples. Simultaneous detection and identification of multiple species of soilborne pathogens such as Pythium species could be a major step forward for epidemiological and ecological studies.
Riociguat for chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension and pulmonary arterial hypertension: a phase II study

We assessed the therapeutic potential of riociguat, a novel soluble guanylate cyclase stimulator, in adults with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH; n = 42) or pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH; n = 33) in World Health Organization (WHO) functional class II/III. In this 12-week, multicentre, open-label, uncontrolled phase II study, patients received oral riociguat 1.0–2.5 mg t.i. d. titrated according to systemic systolic blood pressure (SBP). Primary end-points were safety and tolerability; pharmacodynamic changes were secondary end-points. Riociguat was generally well tolerated. Asymptomatic hypotension (SBP <90 mmHg) occurred in 11 patients, but blood pressure normalised without dose alteration in nine and after dose reduction in two. Median 6-min walking distance increased in patients with CTEPH (55.0 m from baseline (390 m); p<0.0001) and PAH (57.0 m from baseline (337 m); p<0.0001); patients in functional class II or III and bosentan pre-treated patients showed similar improvements. Pulmonary vascular resistance was significantly reduced by 215 dyn·s·cm−5 from baseline (709 dyn·s·cm−5; p<0.0001). 42 (56%) patients were considered to have experienced drug-related adverse events (AEs; 96% mild or moderate). Dyspepsia, headache and hypotension were the most frequent AEs. Study discontinuation because of AEs was 4%. These preliminary data show that riociguat has a favourable safety profile and improves exercise capacity, symptoms and pulmonary haemodynamics in CTEPH and PAH. Randomised controlled trials are underway.
Heuristic neighbor selection algorithm for decentralized load balancing in clustered heterogeneous computational environment

Clustered heterogeneous computing environment is used to execute parallel applications that require significant amount of computing resources either in the form of computational processing resources or data storage. A cluster, comprising of heterogeneous nodes, requires careful load balancing strategies in order to result in a good processing response time for parallel applications. The workload for each system in the cluster cannot be equally distributed but has to be taken as an important parameter for the load balancing strategy. A centralized load balancer would require a global load balancer that will be overwhelmed with communication messages in a large clustered environment. This overhead can be addressed by a decentralized approach to load balancing where decisions are formulated by the nodes performing scheduling algorithm vis-a-vis communicating with each member node of the cluster. Although this will lead to an overall increase of communications, it will eliminate the bottleneck of having a centralized load balancing node. In an overloaded node (sender) initiated decentralized load balancing strategy, each sender will need to have a predetermined list of neighboring nodes to offload their jobs. In this paper, we propose a heuristic based neighbor selection algorithm that selects a neighbor for job distribution whenever overload occurs. Simulations were conducted using the OMNeT++ simulator and the overall proposed performance was compared to other existing neighbor selection method. From our simulation results, we found that our proposed method demonstrates overall improvement for load balancing by reducing the average response time.
MiniExperts: An SVM Approach for Measuring Semantic Textual Similarity

This paper describes the system submitted by the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Malaga for SemEval-2015 Task 2: Semantic Textual Similarity. The system uses a Supported Vector Machine approach based on a number of linguistically motivated features. Our system performed satisfactorily for English and obtained a mean 0.7216 Pearson correlation. However, it performed less adequately for Spanish, obtaining only a mean 0.5158.
Conditional Linear Planning

In this paper we present a sound and complete linear planning algorithm which accomodates conditional actions: actions whose effects cannot be predicted with certainty. Conditional linear planning is significantly simpler than conditional non-linear planning in conception and implementation. Furthermore, the efficiency tradeoffs which favor non-linear planning do not necessarily carry over with the same force to planning with conditional actions. We have applied our conditional linear planner, PLINTH, to the problem of planning image processing actions for NASA's Earth Observing System. We discuss the extension of PLINTH to probabilistic planning.
D-Dimer Levels Predict Myocardial Injury in ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction: A Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Objectives Elevated D-dimer levels on admission predict prognosis in patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), but the association of D-dimer levels with structural markers of myocardial injury in these patients is unknown. Methods We performed cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging in 208 patients treated with primary PCI for STEMI. CMR was performed a median of 3 days after the index procedure. Of the 208 patients studied, 75 patients had D-dimer levels above the normal range on admission (>0.5 μg/mL; high D-dimer group) while 133 had normal levels (≤0.5 μg/mL; low D-dimer group). The primary outcome was myocardial infarct size assessed by CMR. Secondary outcomes included area at risk (AAR), microvascular obstruction (MVO) area, and myocardial salvage index (MSI). Results In CMR analysis, myocardial infarct size was larger in the high D-dimer group than in the low D-dimer group (22.3% [16.2–30.5] versus 18.8% [10.7–26.7]; p = 0.02). Compared to the low D-dimer group, the high D-dimer group also had a larger AAR (38.1% [31.7–46.9] versus 35.8% [24.2–45.3]; p = 0.04) and a smaller MSI (37.7 [28.2–46.9] versus 47.1 [33.2–57.0]; p = 0.01). In multivariate analysis, high D-dimer levels were significantly associated with larger myocardial infarct (OR 2.59; 95% CI 1.37–4.87; p<0.01) and lower MSI (OR 2.62; 95% CI 1.44–4.78; p<0.01). Conclusions In STEMI patients undergoing primary PCI, high D-dimer levels on admission were associated with a larger myocardial infarct size, a greater extent of AAR, and lower MSI, as assessed by CMR data. Elevated initial D-dimer level may be a marker of advanced myocardial injury in patients treated with primary PCI for STEMI.
Improving the efficiency of DoS traceback based on the enhanced ITrace-CP method for mobile environment (Invited Paper)

Denial of service (DoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the Internet. Mobile networks, which are expected to develop rapidly over a few years, are also vulnerable to DoS attacks. Although IP traceback is one of the promising countermeasures for DoS attacks, the fact that attackers have the mobility privilege makes the traceback difficult in mobile networks. In this paper we propose the basic concept of the modification technique for the previously proposed enhanced ITrace-CP scheme in order to trace the attack route before the attacker enters another network. The proposed scheme uses time to live (TTL) values of packets and is capable of tracing the attacker in a short time. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme is more efficient in tracing attackers in a mobile environment than conventional approaches.
WikiWoods: Syntacto-Semantic Annotation for English Wikipedia

WikiWoods is an ongoing initiative to provide rich syntacto-semantic annotations for English Wikipedia. We sketch an automated processing pipeline to extract relevant textual content from Wikipedia sources, segment documents into sentence-like units, parse and disambiguate using a broad-coverage precision grammar, and support the export of syntactic and semantic information in various formats. The full parsed corpus is accompanied by a subset of Wikipedia articles for which gold-standard annotations in the same format were produced manually. This subset was selected to represent a coherent domain, Wikipedia entries on the broad topic of Natural Language Processing.
Response of the Frog Skin to Steady-State Voltage Clamping

Properties of the shunt pathway (a pathway in parallel to the Na transport system) in frog skin have been examined. The permeability of this shunt to urea increases markedly when the skin is depolarized to -100 mv (inside negative) but hyperpolarization to +100 mv produces no change in urea permeability compared to short-circuit conditions. The permeability increase at depolarizing potentials is dependent on the external solute concentration and is considerably reduced by the presence of external Ca. Neither urea permeability nor its response to changes in potential difference are affected by complete inhibition of Na transport by ouabain. In ouabain-poisoned skins, movements of Na, K, Cl, and mannitol through the shunt change in parallel with urea movements. Ion fluxes under these conditions and their response to potential can be described by the constant field equation. The selectivity of the shunt is in the order Cl > urea > K > Na > mannitol and this order does not appear to be affected by the absolute magnitude of the shunt permeability. Arguments are presented suggesting that the pathway is mainly between cells and that its permeability may be affected by cell swelling.
Trade and Turnover: Theory and Evidence

Is the pattern of trade correlated with cross-sector differences in job turnover? Theoretically, external shocks feed through to changes in domestic employment and cross-sector differences in turnover give rise to compensating wage differentials, which feed through to output prices. Using two different data sets on turnover, we find strong evidence that normalized US net exports by sector are negatively correlated with job destruction and worker separation rates. Weaker evidence suggests a positive correlation with between normalized net exports and job acquisition. Using sector-specific job destruction data for both Canada and the US, we find confirmation of the theoretical prediction that normalized net exports to Canada are negatively related to the ratio of the US job destruction rate to the Canadian job destruction rate.
Methods for Improving Medium Reuse in IEEE 802.11 Networks

In this paper we identify the mechanisms in the IEEE 802.11 standard which limit medium reuse by not allowing concurrent transmissions even when they are actually possible. To improve medium reuse we propose an interference management protocol, PCONAV, which cognitively enables and disables the virtual (NAV) and physical carrier sensing (CCA) according to the interference environment. We combine this mechanisms with address filtering and capture and demonstrate improved medium reuse. The proposed cognitive mechanisms are further enhanced with a tuning mechanism that adapts the carrier sensing threshold (CST) at each node. Simulations are used to show the improved performance obtained with each of the proposed mechanisms.
Network Traffic Classification Using Rough Sets

This paper studies the theory of rough sets in order to classify network data. First, some necessary basic concepts of rough sets are introduced. Methods needed for generating rules from a data base are reviewed. The theory is then utilized in a test case. The data used in the classification was recorded from a test network running different network applications. Preprocessing of the data, rule generation and validating classification are described. The target was to classify the traffic by applications, and in the test case 97,5 % of the data was classified correctly. Some useful applications of the results as well as future prospects are also discussed.
Maturationally-constrained competence-based intrinsically motivated learning

This paper studies the coupling of intrinsic motivation and physiological maturational constraints, and argues that both mechanisms may have complex bidirectional interactions allowing to actively control the growth of complexity in motor development. First, we introduce the self-adaptive goal generation algorithm (SAGG), instantiating an intrinsically motivated goal exploration mechanism for motor learning of inverse models. Then, we introduce a functional model of maturational constraints inspired by the myelination process in humans, and show how it can be coupled with the SAGG algorithm, forming a new system called McSAGG. We then present experiments to evaluate qualitative properties of these systems when applied to learning a reaching skill with an arm with initially unknown kinematics.
Task Frames in Robot Manipulation

Most robotics computations refer to a single world-based frame of reference; however, several advantages accrue with the introduction of a second frame, termed a task frame. A task frame is a coordinate frame that can be attached to different objects that are to be manipulated. The task frame is related to the world-based coordinate frame by a simple geometric transformation. The virtues of such a frame are: (1) certain actions that are difficult to specify in the world frame are easily expressed in the task frame; (2) the task-frame to task-world transformation provides a formalism for describing physical actions; and (3) the task frame can be related to the world frame by proprioception.