Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comprehensive miRNA expression profiles in the ilea of Lawsonia intracellularis-infected pigs

To analyze the miRNA expression profiles in Lawsonia intracellularis-infected porcine intestines, infected pigs were first identified using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). Then, RNA from infected intestines and control tissues were isolated and subjected to microarray analysis and RT-PCR. Results showed that a total of 83 miRNAs were differentially expressed between the infected samples and controls, out of which 53 were upregulated and 30 were downregulated. Validation using RT-PCR showed a high degree of confidence for the obtained data. Using the current miRBase release 21.0, nine groups of miRNAs were located in the same cluster, and three groups of miRNAs were found to belong to the same family. Interestingly, except for ssc-miR-10a-5p, all clustered miRNAs and the family members exhibited the same expression patterns. Pathway analysis of the putative gene targets of the differentially expressed miRNAs showed that they were involved in the immune response, amino acid metabolism and cell communication/growth/motility. Thus, the results indicate that altered miRNA expression profiles can affect immunity, metabolism and cellular processes.
Transient Stability Assessment in the Presence of STATCOM Using Combined Neural Network

In this paper we have tried to introduce a model for transient stability prediction of a power system with a Static Compensator (STATCOM) to add a contribution to the subject. For this reason we applied so called, Committee Neural Networks (CNNs) methods as tools for Transient Stability Assessment (TSA) of power system. Transient stability of a power system is first determined based on the generator relative rotor angles procured from time domain simulation outputs. Simulations were carried out on the IEEE 9-bus test system with STATCOM considering three phase faults on the system. The data collected from the time domain simulations are then used as inputs to the CNN in which CNN is used as a classifier to determine whether the power system is stable or unstable.
The Relation of Presence and Virtual Reality Exposure for Treatment of Flying Phobia

Under the direction of Page Anderson ABSTRACT A growing body of literature suggests that Virtual Reality is a successful tool for exposure therapy for anxiety disorders. Virtual Reality (VR) researchers posit the construct of presence, interpreting an artificial stimulus as if it were real, as the mechanism that enables anxiety to be felt during virtual reality exposure therapy (VRE). However, empirical studies on the relation between presence and anxiety in VRE have yielded mixed findings. The current study tested the following hypotheses 1) Presence is related to in session anxiety and treatment outcome; 2) Presence mediates the extent that pre-existing (pre-treatment) anxiety is experienced during exposure with VR; 3) Presence is positively related to the amount of phobic elements included within the virtual environment. Results supported presence as the mechanism by which anxiety is experienced in the virtual environment as well as a relation between presence and the phobic elements, but did not support a relation between presence and treatment outcome. iv To Peggy, I am, and shall forever be, eternally grateful for sharing my life with you. Your endless love and devotion are felt each and every day. I am blessed to share my achievements with you, as your support is the source of my motivation.
Measuring TCP over WiFi: A Real Case

We present a measurement study of an operative WLAN. After briefly presenting the methodology used to generate traffic and measure performance indices, we present results focusing on the performance perceived by TCP connections, to understand the mechanisms which have a major effect on performance. We investigate the impact of TCP parameters, like the maximum congestion window, the effectiveness of link layer mechanisms such as RTS/CTS, and multirate transmissions. Rather than only presenting aggregate measures, we show results relative to individual TCP connections, considering throughput as well as TCP round trip time, congestion window and segment retransmissions.
Social-Based Conceptual Links: Conceptual Analysis Applied to Social Networks

In this work, we propose a novel approach for the discovery of frequent patterns in a social network on the basis of both vertex attributes and link frequency. With an analogy to the traditional task of mining frequent item sets, we show that the issue addressed can be formulated in terms of a conceptual analysis that elicits conceptual links. A social-based conceptual link is a synthetic representation of a set of links between groups of vertexes that share similar internal properties. We propose a first algorithm that optimizes the search into the concept lattice of conceptual links and extracts maximal frequent conceptual links. We study the performances of our solution and give experimental results obtained on a sample example. Finally we show that the set of conceptual links extracted provides a conceptual view of the social network.
Affective responses to body stimuli: comparing male and female bodies with cropped heads and masked faces

ABSTRACT Three studies were conducted to determine whether headless bodies evoke affective responses that might confound neuroimaging and electrophysiological findings. In Experiment 1, 224 participants rated pictures, including bodies with cropped heads and masked faces, for disgust, fear, naturalness, valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, 38 participants viewed the same images during a free word association task, whilst in Experiment 3 galvanic skin responses were measured as 57 participants completed a similar rating task to that in Experiment 1. No differences were found between responses elicited by bodies without heads versus bodies with masked faces, although female bodies were thought of more positively than male bodies. This suggests that headless bodies are not abhorrent and are appropriate stimuli for investigating body-selective perceptual processes as they do not evoke face-processing mechanisms. Our findings also suggest that differences between male and female body viewing should be considered when investigating visual body perception.
Prevalence of uropathogens in diabetic patients and their corresponding resistance pattern: results of a survey conducted at diagnostic centers in dhaka, bangladesh.

OBJECTIVES Urinary tract infection is the second most common clinical indication for empirical antibiotic treatment in primary and secondary health care settings. The incidence of diabetes mellitus throughout the world is increasing strikingly and in the long run, it has some major effects on the genitourinary system which makes diabetic patients more liable to urinary tract infection. This study is designed to reveal the distribution of uropathogens in diabetic patients according to age and sex, and corresponding resistance patterns. METHODS A six-month retrospective review of urine culture assay data from August 2009 to January 2010 from randomly selected 85 patients who suffered from both urinary tract infection and diabetes was conducted. Relevant information was retrieved and analyzed statistically using Microsoft® Excel 2002 software. RESULTS The study showed that females are more vulnerable to pathogenic attack than males throughout a wide age distribution. In terms of pathogenic distribution, Escherichia coli was the highest followed by Streptococcus sp. , Acinetobacter, Klebsiella pneumoniae and few others. Though Meropenem showed no resistance with E. coli, Acinetobacter and Klebsiella pneumoniae, in the case of Streptococcus sp. it exhibited resistance of 25%. Amikacin exhibited only 3% resistance with E. coli, whereas no resistance with Acinetobacter and Klebsiella pneumoniae, and most interestingly showed 75% resistance with Streptococcus sp. Gentamicin exhibited no resistance with Acinetobacter while 26.9%, 50% and 87.5% resistance with E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Streptococcus sp. respectively. Hence, Nitrofurantoin exhibited less resistance 11.9% compared to 12.5% resistance with E. coli and Streptococcus sp. Nitrofurantoin was highly prone to resistance with Acinetobacter and Klebsiella pneumoniae (100%, 50% respectively). Cephalosporins (cephradine, cefixime, ceftriaxone, cefepime etc.) showed moderate resistance (avg. 50%), whereas amoxicillin and ciprofloxacin showed the highest resistance in all these cases. CONCLUSION Pathogens are mostly resistant to antibiotics including amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, cephalosporins and nitrofurantoin, with few exceptions including gentamicin, amikacin and meropenem.
Glucose Inhibition Persists in Hypothalamic Neurons Lacking Tandem-Pore K+ Channels

Glucose sensing by hypothalamic neurons triggers adaptive metabolic and behavioral responses. In orexin neurons, extracellular glucose activates a leak K+ current promoting electrical activity inhibition. Sensitivity to external acidification and halothane, and resistance to ruthenium red designated the tandem-pore K+ (K2P) channel subunit TASK3 as part of the glucose-induced channel. Here, we show that glucose inhibition and its pH sensitivity persist in mice lacking TASK3 or TASK1, or both subunits. We also tested the implication of another class of K2P channels activated by halothane. In the corresponding TREK1/2/TRAAK triple knock-out mice, glucose inhibition persisted in hypothalamic neurons ruling out a major contribution of these subunits to the glucose-activated K+ conductance. Finally, block of this glucose-induced hyperpolarizing current by low Ba2+ concentrations was consistent with the conclusion that K2P channels are not required for glucosensing in hypothalamic neurons.
Power, politics, and MIS implementation

Theories of resistance to management information systems (MIS) are important because they guide the implementation strategies and tactics chosen by implementors. Three basic theories of the causes of resistance underlie many prescriptions and rules for MIS implementation. Simply stated, people resist MIS because of their own internal factors, because of poor system design, and because of the interaction of specific system design features with aspects of the organizational context of system use. These theories differ in their basic assumptions about systems, organizations, and resistance; they also differ in predictions that can be derived from them and in their implications for the implementation process. These differences are described and the task of evaluating the theories on the bases of the differences is begun. Data from a case study are used to illustrate the theories and to demonstrate the superiority, for implementors, of the interaction theory.
A Ngram-based Statistical Machine Translation Approach for Text Normalization on Chat-speak Style Communications

This paper reports our participation on the text normalization shared task campaign organized by the CAW 2.0 workshop. Through a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system we managed to produce sentences syntactically correct given sentences written with misspelled words and chatting slangs. This approach was applied on the evaluation campaign’s test set to measure its performance. Here the results over a development and test set are analyzed and commented.
Overlapping Communities in Social Networks

Complex networks can be typically broken down into groups or modules. Discovering this "community structure" is an important step in studying the large-scale structure of networks. Many algorithms have been proposed for community detection and benchmarks have been created to evaluate their performance. Typically algorithms for community detection either partition the graph (non-overlapping communities) or find node covers (overlapping communities). In this paper, we propose a particularly simple semi-supervised learning algorithm for finding out communities. In essence, given the community information of a small number of "seed nodes", the method uses random walks from the seed nodes to uncover the community information of the whole network. The algorithm runs in time $O(k \cdot m \cdot \log n)$, where $m$ is the number of edges; $n$ the number of links; and $k$ the number of communities in the network. In sparse networks with $m = O(n)$ and a constant number of communities, this running time is almost linear in the size of the network. Another important feature of our algorithm is that it can be used for either non-overlapping or overlapping communities. We test our algorithm using the LFR benchmark created by Lancichinetti, Fortunato, and Radicchi specifically for the purpose of evaluating such algorithms. Our algorithm can compete with the best of algorithms for both non-overlapping and overlapping communities as found in the comprehensive study of Lancichinetti and Fortunato.
deSEO: Combating Search-Result Poisoning

We perform an in-depth study of SEO attacks that spread malware by poisoning search results for popular queries. Such attacks, although recent, appear to be both widespread and effective. They compromise legitimate Web sites and generate a large number of fake pages targeting trendy keywords. We first dissect one example attack that affects over 5,000 Web domains and attracts over 81,000 user visits. Further, we develop de-SEO, a system that automatically detects these attacks. Using large datasets with hundreds of billions of URLs, deSEO successfully identifies multiple malicious SEO campaigns. In particular, applying the URL signatures derived from deSEO, we find 36% of sampled searches to Google and Bing contain at least one malicious link in the top results at the time of our experiment.
A Comparison of Three types of Trail Making Test in the KoreanElderly: Higher Completion Rate of Trail Making Test-Black and Whitefor Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective: A Korean version of Trail Making Test (TMT) led to reduced clinical use in Korea because of lower completion rate. The current study examines multiple TMT versions in effort to identify which type might accurately detect cognitive decline with higher completion rate. Methods: Three versions of TMT including the original TMT, TMT-Korean Letter (TMT-K), and TMT-Black and White (TMT-B&W) were utilized. A total of 62 participants were included, comprised of 30 cognitively normal controls (NC) and 32 mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Three TMT versions were administered to subjects with other neuropsychological tests. Results: TMT-B&W completion time as well as that of Original TMT and TMT-K was successful in distinguishing MCI from NC adjusted for age, sex and educational level. TMT-B&W also showed a high correlation with other neuropsychological tests that represent frontal executive function. Regarding completion rate in MCI patients, Original TMT and TMT-K were not successfully completed (62% and 60.6%, respectively) compared with TMT-B&W (90.1%). Conclusion: As TMT-B&W showed higher completion rate than others and revealed significant correlation with frontal executive function, this culture-fair measure can vitalize TMT task with increased applicability in Korean elderly adults who are unfamiliar with the sequence of English or Korean alphabet.
An Evaluation of Popular Search Engines on Finding Turkish Documents

This article investigates the information retrieval performance of popular search engines on finding Turkish documents. First of all, five popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Msn, All the Web and Ask) and a list of Turkish queries are determined. Each query is run on each search engine one by one and first twenty documents on each retrieval output are evaluated as being 'relevant' and 'non-relevant'. Then, for evaluation of search engines precision and normalized recall ratios are calculated at various cut-off points for each query and search engine. Furthermore, the results are used to make comparison of the search engines with local search engines. Overall,-Google appears to be the best search engine in terms of average precision (73%) and normalized recall ratios (66%), on finding Turkish documents. However, local search engines have lower information retrieval performance to finding Turkish documents and need more improvement than international search engines.
Informational Rents and Discretionary Industrial Assistance

The paper analyses the existence and efficiency of discretionary industrial assistance schemes under asymmetric information between an uninformed government and a uniform distribution of firms with differing productivities. Discretionary assistance allows the government to scrutinise projects in an effort to learn the type to reduce the 'informational rents' of automatic assistance, where firms take up any contract on offer. Two discretionary grant schemes are analysed, which either exclude 'non-additional' projects or reduce the assistance to the minimum necessary for a project to proceed. The paper finds the conditions under which discretionary assistance exists and is more efficient than automatic assistance.
Towards an integrated service-oriented reference enterprise architecture

New business information systems are integrating emerging cloud infrastructures with service-oriented platforms and intelligent user-centered mobile systems. Both architecture engineering and management of service-oriented enterprise architectures is complex and has to integrate synergistic disciplines like EAM - Enterprise Architecture and Management for Services & Cloud Computing, Semantic-based Decision Support through Ontologies and Knowledge-based Systems, Big Data Management, as well as Mobility and Collaboration Systems. It is necessary to identify affected decisions by runtime changes of a service-oriented runtime environment and architecture. We have to make transparent the impact of these changes over the integral landscape of affected EAM-capabilities, like directly and transitively impacted business categories, processes, applications, services, platforms and infrastructures. The paper describes a new Metamodel-based integration approach for Service-oriented Reference Enterprise Architectures.
From Mass to Elite Protests: News Coverage and the Evolution of Antigovernment Demonstrations in Brazil

In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with leftist president Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage delegitimizing social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess the extent to which the paradigm holds when protests take on a conservative elite-supported narrative contesting the government. Through a quantitatively driven mixed-methods approach combining content analysis and interviews with mainstream journalists, this study revealed that when grievances evolved into coherent antigovernment demands, official sources from opposition parties served to legitimize the movement. As such, this study departed from an understanding of protest coverage as paradigmatic toward a complex view of the relationship between protestors and the press. Findings showed that when elite opposition groups supported protests, journalistic norms and routines validated demonstrations.
The warm ionized medium in spiral galaxies

This article reviews observations and models of the diffuse ionized gas that permeates the disk and halo of our Galaxy and others. It was inspired by a series of invited talks presented during an afternoon scientific session of the 65th birthday celebration for Professor Carl Heiles held at Arecibo Observatory in August 2004. This review is in recognition of Carl's long-standing interest in and advocacy for studies of the ionized as well as the neutral components of the interstellar medium.
A Priori SNR Estimation Using Air- and Bone-Conduction Microphones

This paper proposes an a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimator using an air-conduction (AC) and a bone-conduction (BC) microphone. Among various ways of combining AC and BC microphones for speech enhancement, it is shown that the total enhancement performance can be maximized if the BC microphone is utilized for estimating the power spectral density (PSD) of the desired speech signal. Considering the fact that a small deviation in the speech PSD estimation process brings severe spectral distortion, this paper focuses on controlling weighting factors while estimating the a priori SNR with the decision-directed approach framework. The time-frequency varying weighting factor that is determined by taking a minimum mean square error criterion improves the capability of eliminating residual noise and minimizing speech distortion. Since the weighting factors are also adjusted by measuring the usefulness of the AC and BC microphones, the proposed approach is suitable for tracking the parameter even if the characteristic of environment changes rapidly. The simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm to conventional algorithms in high noise environments.
Cooperative Joint Synchronization and Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, cooperative sensor localization using asynchronous time-of-arrival measurements is investigated. It is well known that localization performance in wireless networks using time-based ranging or pseudo-ranging methods is greatly affected by the accuracy of the timing synchronization between the nodes involved in the estimation. Commonly, the original estimation problem is broken down into two subproblems, the synchronization problem and the localization problem, in what is known as a two-step approach. However, in this paper, the joint synchronization and localization problem is considered and examined for use in cooperative networks. It is discussed that the cooperation between the source nodes eliminates the need for high anchor node densities and improves localization performance significantly. Furthermore, the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) and the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator are derived. It is shown that the ML estimator is highly nonlinear and nonconvex and must, therefore, be solved by using computationally complex algorithms. In order to reduce the complexity of the estimation, a novel semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation method is developed by relaxing the original nonconvex ML problem, in such a way as to reformulate the estimation problem as a convex problem. The performance of the proposed SDP method is shown through computer simulations to nearly equal that of the ML estimator. The approach is also applied to the noncooperative case where it is found to be superior in performance than the previously proposed suboptimal estimators. Finally, complexity analyses are included for the estimators under consideration.
Virtual Humans in the Mission Rehearsal Exercise System

How can simulation be made more compelling and effective as a tool for learning? This is the question thatthe Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) set out to answer when it was formed at the University ofSouthern California in 1999, to serve as a nexus between the simulation and entertainment communities.The ultimate goal of the ICT is to create the Experience Learning System (ELS), which will advance thestate of the art in virtual reality immersion through use of high-resolution graphics, immersive audio,virtual humans and story-based scenarios. Once fully realized, ELS will make it possible for participants toenter places in time and space where they can interact with believable characters capable of conversationand action, and where they can observe and participate in events that are accessible only throughsimulation.