Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional Interaction between Epstein-Barr Virus Replication Protein Zta and Host DNA Damage Response Protein 53BP1

ABSTRACT Epstein-Barr virus (EBV; human herpesvirus 4) poses major clinical problems worldwide. Following primary infection, EBV enters a form of long-lived latency in B lymphocytes, expressing few viral genes, and it persists for the lifetime of the host with sporadic bursts of viral replication. The switch between latency and replication is governed by the action of a multifunctional viral protein Zta (also called BZLF1, ZEBRA, and Z). Using a global proteomic approach, we identified a host DNA damage repair protein that specifically interacts with Zta: 53BP1. 53BP1 is intimately connected with the ATM signal transduction pathway, which is activated during EBV replication. The interaction of 53BP1 with Zta requires the C-terminal ends of both proteins. A series of Zta mutants that show a wild-type ability to perform basic functions of Zta, such as dimer formation, interaction with DNA, and the transactivation of viral genes, were shown to have lost the ability to induce the viral lytic cycle. Each of these mutants also is compromised in the C-terminal region for interaction with 53BP1. In addition, the knockdown of 53BP1 expression reduced viral replication, suggesting that the association between Zta and 53BP1 is involved in the viral replication cycle.
Multiple Moving Targets Tracking based on Kernel Localization and Group Trackers for Envisioned Functional Microwave Brain Imaging Applications

This paper presents a new concept of multiple targets tracking using hierarchical trackers based on kernel localization for envisioned functional microwave brain imaging application. For this purpose, the performance of brain activated regions tracking using fMRI video is improved. In the first stage, all of the moving regions in the fMRI video frame are detected. Then, by using the group tracking, histogram and distance corresponding to the moving-targets in the previous frame, the directions of moving-regions are determined. After determining the exact number of moving areas and tracking them, one by one, the direction of each vector is extracted. In addition, due to the kernel labelling, the proposed method has capability of separation and merging by group tracking in conditions of motion paths interfere with each other. The simulated results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for precisely tracking of the activated regions.
Non‐charged amino acids from three different domains contribute to link agonist binding to channel gating in α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors

Binding of agonists to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors results in channel opening. Previously, we have shown that several charged residues at three different domains of the α7 nicotinic receptor are involved in coupling binding and gating, probably through a network of electrostatic interactions. This network, however, could also be integrated by other residues. To test this hypothesis, non‐charged amino acids were mutated and expression levels and electrophysiological responses of mutant receptors were determined. Mutants at positions Asn47 and Gln48 (loop 2), Ile130, Trp134, and Gln140 (loop 7), and Thr264 (M2–M3 linker) showed poor or null functional responses, despite significant membrane expression. By contrast, mutants F137A and S265A exhibited a gain of function effect. In all cases, changes in dose–response relationships were small, EC50 values being between threefold smaller and fivefold larger, arguing against large modifications of agonist binding. Peak currents decayed at the same rate in all receptors except two, excluding large effects on desensitization. Thus, the observed changes could be mostly caused by alterations of the gating characteristics. Moreover, analysis of double mutants showed an interconnection between some residues in these domains, especially Gln48 with Ile130, suggesting a potential coupling between agonist binding and channel gating through these amino acids.
Exploration of Motives and Barriers on Indonesian Organic Products Consumption

This study aims to explore consumer motives and barriers related to the consumption of organic products. The research was conducted using survey method. Respondents in this study are fixed consumers of organic products incorporated as members of the Indonesian Organic Community. Data is collected incrementally. Initial data were collected through an open survey, then Focus Group Discussion was conducted to classify the stimulus from consumers. The next data is collected in a closed and analyzed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and descriptive. Based on the analysis indicates that the motives of consumers to consume organic based on the benefits of organic products is health, safety, naturalness, and the importance of maintaining environmental balance. External factors that determine the choice in the consumption of organic products is a life partner, family, friends or colleagues, while those used as a reference purchase is a media of information such as magazines and television in the form of talk shows and nutritionists. It is a barrier to consumption of organic products is the availability of sellers (ease in obtaining products), product prices, consumer income, knowledge and information of authenticity (validity) of organic products.
Reduction in myocardial high energy phosphate spin lattice relaxation times using manganese

Paramagnetic contrast agents are being widely used in proton magnetic resonance imaging. The present study demonstrates the potential usefulness of paramagnetic contrast agents in 31P NMR spectroscopy. Using the Langendorff perfused rat heart, manganese chloride (Mn2+) at a concentration of 50 μM/L was added to the perfusate for 10 or 30 min. 31P NMR Ti relaxation times were subsequently measured at 121.5 MHz. After the 10 min exposure to Mn2+, 31P NMR Ti measurements of phosphocreatine and ATP were reduced by ca 25 and 50%, respectively, with no significant change in linewidths. A small additional decrease in Ti relaxation times after infusion of Mn2+ for 30 min was not significantly different from the values at 10 min. Potential uses of Mn2+ in 31P NMR spectroscopy include improving the S/N ratio of spectra and assessment of calcium ion channel activity.
25-Gb/s Transmission Over 2.5-km SSMF by Silicon MRR Enhanced 1.55- $\mu \text{m}$ III-V/SOI DML

The use of a micro-ring resonator (MRR) to enhance the modulation extinction ratio and dispersion tolerance of a directly modulated laser is experimentally investigated with a bit rate of 25 Gb/s as proposed for the next generation data center communications. The investigated system combines a 11-GHz 1.55-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> directly modulated hybrid III–V/SOI DFB laser realized by bonding III–V materials (InGaAlAs) on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer and a silicon MRR also fabricated on SOI. Such a transmitter enables error-free transmission (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {BER}<10^{-9}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) at 25 Gb/s data rate over 2.5-km standard single mode fiber without dispersion compensation nor forward error correction. As both laser and MRR are fabricated on the SOI platform, they could be combined into a single device with enhanced performance, thus providing a cost-effective transmitter for short reach applications.
Performance Evaluation of Iris Region Detection and Localization for Biometric Identification System

— The iris recognition technology is the most accurate, fast and less invasive one compared to other biometric techniques using for example fingerprints, face, retina, hand geometry, voice or signature patterns. The system developed in this study has the potential to play a key role in areas of high-risk security and can enable organizations with means allowing only to the authorized personnel a fast and secure way to gain access to such areas. The paper aim is to perform the iris region detection and iris inner and outer boundaries localization. The system was implemented on windows platform using Visual C# programming language. It is easy and efficient tool for image processing to get great performance accuracy. In particular, the system includes two main parts. The first is to preprocess the iris images by using Canny edge detection methods, segments the iris region from the rest of the image and determine the location of the iris boundaries by applying Hough transform. The proposed system tested on 756 iris images from 60 eyes of CASIA iris database images.
Towards the semantic annotation and the prevention of the loss of information of second opinion requests from rural Brazilian primary healthcare providers: the Q-codes use case – a work in progress

Objectives. To support documentation, various terminologies have been created to assist in this activity. Only a few terminologies cover the General Practice / Family Medicine (GP/FM) domain (e.g., the International Classification of Primary Care ICPC). As ICPC fails to capture some non-clinical issues (e.g., organizational and managerial aspects), the Q-Codes taxonomy has been developed to extend ICPC, encompassing those contextual professional issues. The aim of this work is to show the value of Q-Codes in preventing loss of information through the semantic annotation of Second Opinion Requests of rural Brazilian primary healthcare providers. Methods. Question-answer pairs for the years 2010-2012, in the Brazilian-Portuguese language, was obtained from an urban telehealth center. Each selected question was read to determine its semantic meaning, and coded using both the ICPC and Q-Codes classification systems. Based on this meaning, each question was manually assigned between 0 and 5 Q-Codes. Results. The majority of Q-Code assignments were almost equally split between the Patient's Category", QC (42%) and the "Family Doctor's Issue", QD (37%) domains. Domain QT, that is "Knowledge Management", covered 21% of the assignments, while a single assignment was made to the domain QP, “Patient Issue”. Six of the top 10 Q-Codes assigned belong to the cited QC domain, 3 to the QD, and 1 to the QT domain. Discussion. Analysis demonstrates that lost information represents age (QC), health prevention (QD), and medical education (QT). Medical education is one of the reasons that the telehealth system was implement, while age and health prevention are important to providing healthcare in Brazil. Conclusions. Preliminary results show that Q-Codes capture information that otherwise would be lost in the case of using only clinical coding systems such as ICPC.
Activity and mood-based routing for autonomous vehicles

A significant amount of our daily lives is dedicated to driving, leading to an unavoidable exposure to driving-related stress. The rise of autonomous vehicles will likely lessen the extent of this stress and enhance the routine traveling experience. Yet, no matter how diverse they may be, current routing criteria are limited to considering only the passive preferences of a vehicle's users. Thus, to enhance the overall driving experience in autonomous vehicles, we advocate here for the diversification of routing criteria, by additionally emphasizing activity- and mood-based requirements.
A deep super-vector based representation for clustering

Deep learning is a powerful method that has achieved huge success in numerous supervised applications. Nonetheless, the performance of deep learning in unsupervised learning has been far from being explored. Inspired by this observation, we proposed a deep autoencoder based representation learning for clustering. For this purpose, we devised a stacked autoencoder without the fine-tuning step and concatenated all layers' representations together to make a super vector that is a more powerful representation for clustering. We use k-means as our clustering algorithm and compare its results with the k-means clustering results on original representations. Our method was evaluated on six datasets and the results are promising.
Normal Approximation Diagnostics for the Cox Model

Summary. We discuss two diagnostic methods for assessing the accuracy of the normal approximated confidence region to the likelihood‐based confidence region for the Cox proportional hazards model with censored data. The proposed diagnostic methods are extensions of the contour measures of Hodges (1987, Journal of the American Statistical Association82, 149–154) and Cook and Tsai (1990, Journal of the American Statistical Association85, 770–777) and the curvature measures of Jennings (1986, Journal of the American Statistical Association81, 471–476) and Cook and Tsai (1990). These methods are also illustrated in a study of hepatocyte growth factor in patients with lung cancer and a Mayo Clinic randomized study of participants with primary biliary cirrhosis.
A homozygous mutation in a consanguineous family consolidates the role of ALDH1A3 in autosomal recessive microphthalmia

Anomalies of eye development can lead to the rare eye malformations microphthalmia and anophthalmia (small or absent ocular globes), which are genetically very heterogeneous. Several genes have been associated with microphthalmia and anophthalmia, and exome sequencing has contributed to the identification of new genes. Very recently, homozygous variations within ALDH1A3 have been associated with autosomal recessive microphthalmia with or without cysts or coloboma, and with variable subphenotypes of developmental delay/autism spectrum disorder in eight families. In a consanguineous family where three of the five siblings were affected with microphthalmia/coloboma, we identified a novel homozygous missense mutation in ALDH1A3 using exome sequencing. Of the three affected siblings, one had intellectual disability and one had intellectual disability and autism, while the last one presented with normal development. This study contributes further to the description of the clinical spectrum associated with ALDH1A3 mutations, and illustrates the interfamilial clinical variation observed in individuals with ALDH1A3 mutations.
The Growing Importance of Materials Characterization in Biocompatibility Testing

At the heart of these changes is a strong emphasis on the need for ensuring biocompatibility. This heightened awareness of the safety of medical devices has taken on an international character, in large part because of the convergence of FDA regulations and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards.1,2As international requirements for the biological evaluation of materials continue to be developed and issued, the use of the chemical characterization of materials to establish biocompatibility will become essential.
Behavioral and general effects of subacute oral arsenic exposure in rats with and without fluoride

Consequences of oral arsenic and fluoride exposure on motor behavior and general toxicity were modeled in young adult male rats which received sodium (meta)arsenite (10 mg/kg b.w.), sodium fluoride (5 mg/kg b.w.), and their combination by gavage, once daily, 5 days a week for 6 weeks. After 6 weeks, 6 animals per group were dissected, while the other 6 were kept for 6 more weeks untreated. Body weight, together with food and water consumption, was measured daily. Arsenic, alone or along with fluoride, caused significant decrease in rearing, and increase in immobility and local activity in the open field in the 3rd and 6th week. By the 12th week, these changes mostly diminished. Weight gain, and food and water consumption were significantly reduced by arsenic but normalized post treatment. Fluoride had no own effect and mostly no influence on effects of arsenic. Massive deposition of arsenic in the rats’ blood, cerebral cortex, and liver by the 6th week, and partial elimination by the 12th week, was seen. The results underline the risk of neuro-functional damage by arsenic and call for further investigations.
Singular spectrum analysis — an effective method for GPR data processing

The aim of SSA is to make a decomposition of the original series (GPR traces in the considered case) into a sum of a small number of independent and interpretable components such as: low-frequency trends, narrowband quasi-periodic signals and noise. In this paper SSA based algorithms that ldquocleanrdquo noise from the radargram and/or enhance certain characteristics of the GPR data are presented. The results show the SSA based algorithms are well suited to impulse GPR data processing. SSA method applied to data makes GPR images more acceptable for initial interpretation and data evaluation.
Dictionary Learning-Based Hough Transform for Road Detection in Multispectral Image

It is of great importance to determine the location and orientation of a straight road in multispectral images for remote sensing. One of the classical methods for straight line detection is the Hough transform that is widely used in binary images. Although there are many previous works for straight road detection, it is still in its infancy to extract a straight road in multispectral images for remote sensing. In this letter, we propose a multiview dictionary learning formulation to approximate the Hough transform for straight road detection in multispectral images. Our formulation can exploit the complementary among the multiple spectral channels. Furthermore, it is natural to incorporate regularizations of prior information to significantly leverage the performance. We consider $L_{1}$ -norm regularization as a case study and conduct extensive experiments on RSSCN7 data set to verify the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in comparison with traditional methods.
Prospects for Context Prediction Despite the Principle of Informational Self-Determination

Until now informational self-determination has not been examined in relation to context prediction. The right of users to decide whether or not and how they want their personal data to be used is not ensured. This paper analyses the problem by introducing the state of the art and application fields of context prediction with focus on the users’ personal data. Subsequently, informational self-determination and the problems that arise if techniques of context prediction compete with informational self determination will be presented. Finally, possible solutions for overcoming these problems will be outlined.
INTERNAL FACTORS INFLUENCING EXTERNAL AUDITORS INDEPENDENCE AMONG PRACTICING ACCOUNTANTS IN KENYA

Purpose – Auditors independence holds sway in ensuring that the public has confidence in financial reporting. Therefore, this study focus was to examine the factors that determine external auditors’ independence in Kenya. Methodology - The study employed a cross-sectional descriptive study design and used primary data. The collected data was analyzed with the help of the SPSS software version 22 and presented with the help of frequency distributions, computation of mean and standard deviation. The association between the research variables was presented using an ordinal a regression model. Findings – The study established that internal factors influence auditor independence by 31.7%. From the results of the research, it also revealed that there is a significant relationship between audit tenure, audit firm size and audit independence. This was indicated with a p-value of 0.029 and 0.009. The study also established that there is no significant relationship between audit committee and audit independence with a p-value of 0.465. The study concludes that audit tenure and firm size affect audit independence and thereby the study recommends the need for ICPAK to develop a policy that will guide audit tenure and audit committee. Implications – The study findings suggest that ICPAK develops a policy that will guide the audit tenure and audit committees, this will in essence promote an understanding of the auditors’ independence in the profession. The study also further suggested that similar studies should be carried and focus on the perception of users such as institutional and private investors, audit committees and members of regulatory bodies. Value - The findings of the study concludes that audit tenure and firm size affect audit independence and thereby the study recommends the need for the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK) to develop a policy that will guide audit tenure and audit committee. Key words: Audit Committee, Auditor Independence, Auditor, Audit tenure, Audit Quality.
A Price Based Approach to Estimate the Effects of Monetary Arrangements on Trade Integration

A rapidly expanding literature studies the effect of currency union and other exchange rate arrangements on goods market integration. All existing studies employ a methodology based on observed volumes of trade. However, from a theoretical point of view the connection between market integration and the volume of trade is loose. In this paper, we propose a different metric of market integration, based on the dispersion of prices of identical products in different countries. This metric is motivated by the theory of arbitrage in the presence of transaction costs. We apply the methodology to a unique 3-dimensional data set that includes prices of 95 very disaggregated goods (e.g., light bulbs and toothpaste with fluoride) in 83 cities around the world from 1990 to 2000. We find that a currency board or a currency union generally provides a stimulus to goods market integration that goes far beyond merely reducing exchange rate volatility to zero. However, there are important exceptions. Long-term currency unions exhibit greater integration than more recent currency boards. All existing arrangements can improve their integration further relative to a U.S. benchmark.
Juvenile oculodermal xanthogranuloma.

SINCE the initial description of a case of "Nevoxantho-endothelioma with ocular involvement" by Blank, Eglick, and Beerman (1949), the clinical picture of xanthogranuloma as it affects the eye has become well publicized. Almost invariably the disease remains confined to the one eye, but Radian, Radian, and Ostfeld (1964) have reported a bilateral case. A second example in which the disease successively involved the two eyes and which, as a result, posed a difficult therapeutic problem is reported here.
Security in Legacy Systems Migration to the Cloud: A Systematic Mapping Study

While cloud computing emerges as a major trend in IT industry, early providers and adopters are paving the path with concerns and solutions. One of the most worrisome challenges that face the corporate clients of this new form of IT provision is how to maintain the security of their most important every day apps in the new environment, that is how to migrate securely their legacy systems that run on data centres fully controlled by the organization's IT department to a less clearly controlled infrastructure that is managed at least partly outside the scope of the clients premises and even completely off-shore. This paper presents a Systematic Mapping Study on the issue as the first step to analyze the different existing approaches in the literature about migration process to Cloud computing where taking into account the security aspects that have to be also moved to Cloud. We propose four research questions dealing with the existing strategies to migrate legacy, how they relate to common security issues as well as security issues specific to the cloud environment, and how the proposals are aligned with security standards.