Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maximizing Network Performance Based on Group Centrality by Creating Most Effective k-Links

Group centrality is an extension of the conventional node centrality in which the importance of a group of nodes together is the target for performance evaluation. We used this notion and formulated a link creation problem to a spatial network. The kind of problem we want to solve is to find the best places to construct k new roads to maximize the evacuation performance. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem to maximize the gain of the group closeness centrality by creating a set of new roads (k links) with the constraints on the road range distance (link length limit Δ). The problem is NP-hard. We show that this problem is reduced to a node selection problem and the objective function is submodular when there is no constraint on the link length limit. We devised an efficient greedy algorithm to search for the best k new roads under the constraint of Δ that comprises three steps: centrality calculation, parents selection and nodes selection. We applied this algorithm to three real road networks of different cities and evaluated its performance with respect to k and Δ. The algorithm is quite efficient and obtains the efficiency gain of 10^3 to 10^6 compared with a naive method in which every single node is blindly tested as a candidate from which to create a new road.
Scientific Capacity and Industrial Development As Locomotors of International Competitiveness in Latin America

Different bodies of literature emphasise the separate impact of the manufacturing sector and scientific capacity for competitiveness in developing countries. Scientific knowledge can increase productivity and promote innovation, while the manufacturing sector creates spillovers and generates processes of learning-by-doing. Yet, do these two processes complement each other? Do they, together, contribute to even higher international competitiveness? This paper explores these questions, drawing on an eleven-years panel data set for ten South American economies. We develop a moderation hypothesis model based on the congruence between science, industry, and international competitiveness. Our results support our hypothesis that scientific capacity and manufacturing development have a joint impact on international competitiveness that goes beyond their marginal effects and thus calls for future efforts to implement industrial policy.
Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty for spontaneous osteonecrosis

Background: Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) is an effective treatment option for medial compartment osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. Whether spontaneous osteonecrosis of the knee (SPONK) can be successfully treated with UKA remains controversial. This study evaluated the clinical and radiological results of patients with SPONK who were treated by UKA using Oxford phase III prostheses. Methods: We compared a prospective series of 23 UKA cases operated for SPONK with 235 UKA cases operated for OA. All patients underwent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to confirm the diagnosis and exclude any major lesion in the lateral compartment. The stage, condylar ratio, and volume of the necrotic lesion were evaluated. The pre and postoperative Oxford knee scores (OKSs) were compared. Results: The mean follow-up was 60 months. No statistical differences in complication rates between the groups were found. The mean OKS improved from 39.48 ± 5.69 to 18.83 ± 3.82 (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences in the pre and postoperative OKS between the different groups. Conclusion: SPONK can be successfully treated with UKA, with a favorable short- to mid-term follow-up.
Perceptions and experiences regarding the impact of race on the quality of healthcare in Southeast Brazil: a qualitative study

ABSTRACT Objective: To explore the impact of race on the quality of healthcare received by patients attending a primary care centre in Brazil. Design: This was a qualitative study consisting of 19 semi-structured interviews conducted on patients from six racial groups (as defined in Brazil as white, yellow, brown, black and indigenous and one self-identified ‘other’ group). The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Four main themes were identified during analysis; factors affecting the access to healthcare, experiences regarding quality of healthcare, discrimination in healthcare and deep-rooted societal discrimination, which were categorised into a number of sub-themes. Within these themes, interviewees reported (1) experiences of racism in society towards the black racial group, (2) one personal perception and two observations of racial discrimination in healthcare, (3) perceived racial discrimination due to healthcare professional behaviour and (4) other factors, such as delays in appointments and long waiting times in health facilities were felt to impact access to care. Conclusion: The findings suggest that racial discrimination exists in Brazilian society but its direct impact on healthcare access was felt to be less obvious. Instead, organisational level factors were felt to contribute to difficulty accessing care. Interviewees perceived that racial discrimination may affect the quality of care, particularly for those designated as ‘black’. Socio-economic factors were felt to influence discrimination in healthcare. The findings can help inform further studies and educational initiatives to help address discrimination and access to healthcare in Brazil.
Insights into endosomal maturation of human holo‐transferrin in the enteric parasite Entamoeba histolytica: essential roles of Rab7A and Rab5 in biogenesis of giant early endocytic vacuoles

The pathogenic amoeba Entamoeba histolytica is one of the causative agents of health hazards in tropical countries. It causes amoebic dysentery, colitis and liver abscesses in human. Iron is one of the essential nutritional resources for survival and chronic infection caused by the amoeba. The parasite has developed multiple ways to import, sequester and utilize iron from various iron‐binding proteins from its host. In spite of its central role in pathogenesis, the mechanism of iron uptake by the parasite is largely unknown. Here, we carried out a systematic study to understand the role of some of the amoebic homologues of mammalian endocytic Rab GTPases (Rab5 and Rab21, Rab7A and Rab7B) in intracellular transport of human holo‐transferrin by the parasite. Flow cytometry and quantitative microscopic image analysis revealed that Rab5 and Rab7A are required for the biogenesis of amoebic giant endocytic vacuoles (GEVs) and regulate the early phase of intracellular trafficking of transferrin. Rab7B is involved in the late phase, leading to the degradation of transferrin in the amoebic lysosome‐like compartments. Using time‐lapse fluorescence imaging in fixed trophozoites, we determined the kinetics of the vesicular transport of transferrin through Rab5‐, Rab7A‐ and Rab7B‐positive compartments. The involvement of Rab7A in the early phase of endocytosis by the parasite marks a significant divergence from its host in terms of spatiotemporal regulation by the Rab GTPases.
Retroviral DNA Methylation and Epigenetic Repression Are Mediated by the Antiviral Host Protein Daxx

ABSTRACT Integrated retroviral DNA is subject to epigenetic transcriptional silencing at different frequencies. This process is mediated by repressive DNA methylation and histone modifications on viral chromatin. However, the detailed mechanisms by which retroviral silencing is initiated and maintained are not well understood. Using a model system in which avian sarcoma virus (ASV) DNA is epigenetically repressed in mammalian cells, we previously found that a cellular scaffolding protein, Daxx, acts as an antiretroviral factor that promotes epigenetic repression through recruitment of histone deacetylases (HDACs). Here we show that human Daxx protein levels are increased in response to retroviral infection and that Daxx acts at the time of infection to initiate epigenetic repression. Consistent with a rapid and active antiviral epigenetic response, we found that repressive histone marks and long terminal repeat (LTR) DNA methylation could be detected within 12 h to 3 days postinfection, respectively. Daxx was also found to be required for long-term ASV silencing maintenance and full viral DNA methylation, and it was physically associated with both viral DNA and DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs). These findings support a model in which incoming retroviral protein-DNA complexes are detected by Daxx, and the integrated provirus is rapidly chromatinized and repressed by DNA methylation and histone modification as part of an antiviral response. These results uncover a possible direct and active antiviral mechanism by which DNMTs can be recruited to retroviral DNA.
Subtitles for movie commercial trailers: A technology-based translation

Movie commercial trailers are accessible and user-friendly materials for the students. However, subtitles creation for movie commercial trailers is a complicated task as well as a self-rewarding skill for them. Closed-captions in the source language are usually attached to most trailers while only a few have subtitles in the target language. This can result into the loss of audience's interest to watch the full-version movies. This study investigates the practices and challenges of intertwining Aegisub subtitle software and linguistic principles of subtitle. In the Subtitling course, students of English Department of Universitas Dian Nuswantoro were made to create subtitles for movie trailers with the Aegisub software as their classroom project. By observing the project, the researchers gathered and reviewed the data of subtitles in the target language. In order to determine the accuracy of movie trailers subtitles, the application of the subtitling software was recorded. During the process of creating and rendering the subtitles in the target language, it can be identified that the students made 2 successful adjustments, namely technical and linguistic adjustments. In conclusion, they learned fast enough to deal with putting the software into practice; on the other hand there is a strong tendency that idiomatic expressions were still literally-preserved by the students. This indicates that translation competence is not fully mastered.
The Contribution of Cervical Propriospinal Premotoneurons in Recovering Hemiparetic Stroke Patients

There is evidence in humans that the C3/4 level of the spinal cord is a site for sensorimotor integration, analogous to the C3/4 propriospinal system (PS) in cat. Although the clinical relevance of the putative C3/4 PS in humans is not clear, there is some evidence indicating that drive to upper limb muscles via this nonmonosynaptic pathway is upregulated as a compensatory mechanism in stroke and in Parkinson's disease. The authors investigated whether descending drive via the C3/4 PS to affected limb wrist flexors of moderately to well-recovered chronic stroke patients is upregulated compared with controls. The extent of descending drive via the C3/4 PS was assessed in seven patients and seven control subjects during the onset of cocontraction of the biceps brachii and flexor carpi radialis (FCR), during which transcranial magnetic stimulation was used to evoke motor potentials in FCR. Responses were conditioned by subthreshold stimulation of the musculocutaneous nerve. The extent of this facilitation was taken as a measure of the proportion of drive to FCR motoneurons being transmitted via the C3/4 PS. Patients revealed greater facilitation than control subjects, suggesting that descending drive to forearm flexors was being transmitted via the C3/4 PS as a compensation mechanism after stroke.
Evaluation of bacteriochlorophyll-reconstituted low-density lipoprotein nanoparticles for photodynamic therapy efficacy in vivo.

AIM To evaluate the novel nanoparticle reconstituted bacteriochlorin e6 bisoleate low-density lipoprotein (r-Bchl-BOA-LDL) for its efficacy as a photodynamic therapy agent delivery system in xenografts of human hepatoblastoma G2 (HepG2) tumors. MATERIALS & METHODS Bchl-BOA was encapsulated in the nanoparticle low-density lipoprotein (LDL), a native particle whose receptor's overexpression is a cancer signature for a number of neoplasms. Evaluation of r-Bchl-BOA-LDL as a potential photosensitizer was performed using a tumor response and foot response assay. RESULTS & DISCUSSION When compared with controls, tumor regrowth was significantly delayed at injected murine doses of 2 µmole/kg r-Bchl-BOA-LDL after illumination at fluences of 125, 150 or 175 J/cm(2). Foot response assays showed that although normal tissue toxicity accompanied the higher fluences it was significantly reduced at the lowest fluence tested. CONCLUSION This research demonstrates that r-Bchl-BOA-LDL is an effective photosensitizer and a promising candidate for further investigation.
Adaptive Network Coding for Spectrum Sharing Systems

In this paper, we propose an adaptive network coding scheme for cognitive relay networks comprising multiple secondary sources communicating with a common destination in the presence of multiple primary users. Conventional network coding schemes developed for cognitive radio networks normally use global encoding kernels to achieve the minimum end-to-end outage probability. Finding the global kernel is computationally inefficient especially when the number of nodes in a network changes. To this end, we propose a network coding scheme that evenly groups the codewords into multiple subsets, linearly combines the network encoded codewords over the reduced subset, and dynamically adjusts the encoding set size to minimize the end-to-end outage probability. An advantage of the proposed network coding scheme is that it achieves lower end-to-end outage probability as compared to the conventional network coding scheme over the whole signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range with a small additional overhead. We derive closed-form expressions for the link outage probability while taking the interference constraints into consideration. We also derive the exact end-to-end outage probability of the proposed scheme and compare its performance to that of conventional fixed network coding. We show that the proposed scheme provides a trade-off between the probability of relay cooperation and network coding gain. We demonstrate through numerical examples that the proposed adaptive network coding scheme achieves gains of more than 4 dB at a target outage probability of 10-2 as compared to conventional fixed network coding schemes.
Decoupling load dynamics to prevent power system collapse

With the increasing use of constant power loads in power systems, the impact of the loads on the dynamic behavior of the system cannot be ignored. This paper introduces a power buffer configuration based on the boost converter topology. The power buffer functions to decouple the effects of upstream fault disturbance in the power system from the loads, so as to mitigate the negative influence of the constant power loads on system stability. Furthermore, the power buffer enhances the operation of the loads. Appropriate control schemes for the power buffer are proposed and simulation results are given to verify the validity of the power buffer concept
A maternal RNA encoding smad1/5 is segregated to animal blastomeres during ascidian development

Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) research on the ascidian Halocynthia roretzi revealed that Hrsmad1/5, a homolog of smad genes, is expressed in H. roretzi eggs. A comparison of amino acid sequences of smad family members showed that the isolated clone was a homolog of smad1 and smad5 of vertebrates. A molecular phylogenetic analysis showed that Hrsmad1/5 was separated from the common ancestor with the group containing smad1 and smad5. A northern blot analysis showed that transcript of Hrsmad1/5 was abundant in the fertilized egg. The amount of the transcript remained constant until the gastrulae and then rapidly decreased at the neurulae. The spatial expression of Hrsmad1/5 was investigated by means of whole‐mount in situ hybridization. Maternal transcripts of Hrsmad1/5 were detected in the entire fertilized egg. The signals were localized preferentially to the animal blastomeres of the 8‐, 16‐, 32‐ and 64‐cell stages. The zygotic expression of Hrsmad1/5 started in prospective epidermal blastomeres in the animal hemisphere at the 64‐cell stage but not in cells of the central nervous system, and it decreased rapidly around the neural‐plate stage. At the tail‐bud stage, signals were detected broadly all through the trunk and in a small part of the epidermis in the tail region. This is the first report of a maternal RNA that preferentially accumulates in the animal hemisphere in early ascidian embryos. Animal blastomeres of ascidian embryos differentiate mainly into epidermis in a cell‐autonomous manner and partly differentiate into neural tissues by induction. The Hrsmad1/5 gene may play a role in the signal transduction process in epidermal precursor cells of ascidian embryos.
Unsupervised Multilayer Feature Learning for Satellite Image Scene Classification

This letter proposes a simple but effective approach to automatically learn a multilayer image feature for satellite image scene classification. Different from the hand-crafted features which are empirically designed but lack high generalization ability, the proposed approach can autonomously extract the data-dependent feature. The presented feature extraction algorithm is composed of two layers, and the bases of these two layers are uniformly learned by a plain $K$-means clustering algorithm. Coincidentally, the feature extraction performance of the aforementioned two layers is consistent with visual processing of human visual cortex. More specifically, the first layer can generate edgelike bases, which are analogous to the neuron responses of primary visual cortex (V1), and the second layer can produce cornerlike bases, which resemble the neuron responses of visual extrastriate cortical area two (V2). The proposed feature extraction approach can automatically extract not only simple structure features (e.g., edges) but also complex structure features (e.g., corners and junctions). The learned feature is further discriminated by the linear support vector machine classifier for scene classification. In order to fairly demonstrate the validity of the proposed feature extraction approach, its satellite image scene classification performance is evaluated on the public UCM-21 data set. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperform several recent state-of-the-art approaches.
The Compass Rose in Electricity Prices

The "compass rose pattern" is known to appear in the phase portraits, or scatter diagrams, of the high-frequency returns of financial series. We first show that this pattern is also present in the returns of spot electricity prices. Early researchers investigating these phenomena hoped that these patterns signaled the presence of rich dynamics, possibly chaotic or fractal in nature. Although there is a definite autoregressive and conditional heteroscedasticity structure in electricity returns, we find that after simple filtering no pattern remains. While the series is non-normal in terms of their distribution and statistical tests fail to identify significant chaos, there is evidence of fractal structures in periodic price returns when measured over the trading day. The phase diagram of the filtered returns provides a useful visual check on independence, a property necessary for pricing and trading derivatives and portfolio construction, as well as providing useful insights into the market dynamics.
Transgenic cotton expressing CYP392A4 double‐stranded RNA decreases the reproductive ability of Tetranychus cinnabarinus

As a polyphagous pest, Tetranychus cinnabarinus has the ability to overcome the defense of various hosts, and causes severe losses to various economically important crops. Since the interaction between pest and host plants is a valuable clue to investigate potential ways for pest management, we intend to identify the key genes of T. cinnabarinus for its adaption on cotton, then, with RNA interference (RNAi) and transgenic technology, construct a transgenic cotton strain to interfere with this process, and evaluate the effect of this method on the management of the mites. The difference of gene expression of T. cinnabarinus was analyzed when it was transferred to a new host (from cowpea to cotton) through high‐throughput sequencing, and a number of differentially expressed genes involved in detoxification, digestion and specific processes during the development were classified. From them, a P450 gene CYP392A4 with high abundance and prominent over‐expression on the cotton was selected as a candidate. With transgenic technology, cotton plants expressing double‐stranded RNA of CYP392A4 were constructed. Feeding experiments showed that it can decrease the expression of the target gene, result in the reduction of reproductive ability of the mites, and the population of T. cinnabarinus showed an apparent fitness cost on the transgenic cotton. These results provide a new approach to restrict the development of mite population on the host. It is also a useful attempt to control piercing sucking pests through RNAi and transgenic technology.
Functional and Structural Dynamics of Hepadnavirus Reverse Transcriptase during Protein-Primed Initiation of Reverse Transcription: Effects of Metal Ions

ABSTRACT Reverse transcription in hepadnaviruses is primed by the viral reverse transcriptase (RT) (protein priming) and requires the interaction between the RT and a specific viral RNA template termed ε. Protein priming is resistant to a number of RT inhibitors that can block subsequent viral DNA elongation and likely requires a distinct “priming” conformation. Furthermore, protein priming may consist of two distinct stages, i.e., the attachment of the first deoxynucleotide to RT (initiation) and the subsequent addition of 2 or 3 deoxynucleotides (polymerization). In particular, a truncated duck hepatitis B virus RT (MiniRT2) is competent in initiation but defective in polymerization when tested in the presence of Mg2+. Given the known effects of metal ions on the activities of various DNA and RNA polymerases, we tested if metal ions could affect hepadnavirus RT priming. We report here that Mn2+, in comparison with Mg2+, showed dramatic effects on the priming activity of MiniRT2 as well as the full-length RT. First and foremost, MiniRT2 exhibited full polymerization activity in the presence of Mn2+, indicating that MiniRT2 contains all sequences essential for polymerization but is unable to transition from initiation to polymerization with Mg2+. Second, the initiation activities of MiniRT2 and the full-length RT were much stronger with Mn2+. Third, the nucleotide and template specificities during protein priming were decreased in the presence of Mn2+. Fourth, polymerization was sensitive to inhibition by a pyrophosphate analog in the presence of Mn2+ but not in the presence of Mg2+. Finally, limited proteolysis provided direct evidence that the priming active MiniRT2 adopted distinct conformations depending on the presence of Mn2+ versus that of Mg2+ and that the transition from initiation to polymerization was accompanied by RT conformational change.