Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Believe it or not: Religious and other paranormal beliefs in the United States

Paranormal beliefs are often divided between those that are central to traditional Christian doctrine, such as the belief in heaven and hell, and those that are commonly associated with the supernatural or occult, such as the belief in ESP and psychic healing. This study employs data from a recent nationwide random sample general population survey to catalog the social correlates of paranormal beliefs and to examine the relationships between religious and other paranormal beliefs. The results indicate that standard social background factors do a poor job of accounting for who believes in paranormal phenomena and that the importance of specific background factors changes dramatically from phenomenon to phenomenon. The results also show that the correlations between belief in religious phenomena and other paranormal phenomena are largely insignificant. These findings call into question many prevailing theories about paranormal beliefs.
Molecular Subtyping of Poultry-Associated Type A Clostridium perfringens Isolates by Repetitive-Element PCR

ABSTRACT Clostridium perfringens strains (type A) isolated from an integrated poultry operation were subtyped using repetitive-element PCR with Dt primers. Isolates were obtained from fecal, egg shell, fluff, and carcass rinse samples as part of a previously reported temporally linked epidemiological survey. A total of 48 isolates of C. perfringens were obtained from different stages of the broiler chicken production chain from two separate breeder farms that supplied a single hatchery that in turn provided chicks to a single grow-out farm whose flocks were processed at a single plant. All 48 isolates were typeable (100% typeability) by repetitive-element PCR with Dt primers. This subtyping method was highly reproducible and discriminatory. By repetitive-element PCR with Dt primers, isolates were classified into four major branches with 12 subgroups or clades. The Simpson's index of discrimination was calculated to be 0.96 for groupings of >95% correlation. Toxin gene profiles of the isolates indicated that all of the isolates were C. perfringens alpha-toxin gene positive and 46 of 48 isolates were beta2-toxin gene positive. All strains were negative for beta- and epsilon-toxin genes. Repetitive sequence-based PCR was found to be a technically practical and reproducible means of subtyping C. perfringens libraries from specific epidemiological or production environment settings.
A first step toward autonomic optical burst switched networks

In this paper, we discuss issues involved in developing autonomic Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks. We develop an OBS network system, the first of its kind, which is self-aware, self-protecting, and self-optimizing, which are essential requirements of an autonomic network system. We use learning automata to autonomously learn the network state and make intelligent choices of route and wavelength, for burst transmission. We develop, for the first time, a self-protecting mechanism, to guard against contention losses and to adapt to network component (link/node) failures. For each connection (flow), at any point of time, this system either works without protection or chooses from one of many available protection mechanisms, based on the current network conditions and the performance requirements. Further, we develop a self-restoration mechanism based on deflection routing, wherein learning automata are used to identify an efficient alternate route to the destination, when there is a failure on the primary route. We show through extensive simulation studies that our mechanisms significantly improve burst loss probability over their existing counterparts.
Enhanced tumor cell kill by combined treatment with a small-molecule antagonist of mouse double minute 2 and adenoviruses encoding p53

Strategies to treat cancer by restoring p53 tumor suppressor functions are being actively investigated. These approaches range from expressing an exogenous p53 gene in p53 mutant cancers to antagonizing a p53 inhibitor in p53 wild-type (WT) cancer cells. In addition, exogenous p53 is used to strengthen the anticancer efficacy of oncolytic adenoviruses. Many cancers express high levels of the major negative regulator of p53, mouse double minute 2 (MDM2) protein. Recently, a novel class of highly potent and specific MDM2 antagonists, the Nutlins, was identified. We envisioned that Nutlins could protect both endogenous and exogenous p53 from MDM2-mediated inactivation. We therefore investigated treating human cancer cells with a combination of adenovirus-mediated p53 gene therapy and Nutlin. Combination treatment resulted in broadly effective cell kill of p53 WT and p53-negative cancer cells. Cytotoxicity was associated with profound cell cycle checkpoint activation and apoptosis induction. We also tested Nutlin in combination with oncolytic adenoviruses. Nutlin treatment accelerated viral progeny burst from oncolytic adenovirus-infected cancer cells and caused an estimated 10- to 1,000-fold augmented eradication of p53 WT cancer cells. These findings suggest that Nutlins are promising compounds to be combined with p53 gene therapy and oncolytic virotherapy for cancer. [Mol Cancer Ther 2007;6(5):1552–61]
Modulation of CD44 Activity by A6-Peptide

Hyaluronan (HA) is a non-sulfated glycosaminoglycan distributed throughout the extracellular matrix that plays a major role in cell adhesion, migration, and proliferation. CD44, a multifunctional cell surface glycoprotein, is a receptor for HA. In addition, CD44 is known to interact with other receptors and ligands, and to mediate a number of cellular functions as well as disease progression. Studies have shown that binding of HA to CD44 in cancer cells activates survival pathways resulting in cancer cell survival. This effect can be blocked by anti-CD44 monoclonal antibodies. A6 is a capped, eight l-amino acid peptide (Ac-KPSSPPEE-NH2) derived from the biologically active connecting peptide domain of the serine protease, human urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA). A6 neither binds to the uPA receptor (uPAR) nor interferes with uPA/uPAR binding. A6 binds to CD44 resulting in the inhibition of migration, invasion, and metastasis of tumor cells, and the modulation of CD44-mediated cell signaling. A6 has been shown to have no dose-limiting toxicity in animal studies. A6 has demonstrated efficacy and an excellent safety profile in Phase 1a, 1b, and 2 clinical trials. In animal models, A6 has also exhibited promising results for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy and wet age-related macular degeneration through the reduction of retinal vascular permeability and inhibition of choroidal neovascularization, respectively. Recently, A6 has been shown to be directly cytotoxic for B-lymphocytes obtained from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia expressing the kinase, ZAP-70. This review will discuss the activity of A6, A6 modulation of HA and CD44, and a novel strategy for therapeutic intervention in disease.
Accidents always Come in Threes : A Case Study of Data-intensive Programs in Parallel Haskell

Accidents happen: “An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle and vanished. ” “I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed for the embankment. ” “As I approached the intersection a sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before. ” Luckily, we don’t normally have to deal with problems as bizarre as these. One interesting application that does arise at the Centre for Transport Studies consists of matching police reports of several accidents so as to locate accident blackspots. The application provides an interesting, data-intensive, test-bed for the persistent functional language PFL. We report here on an approach aimed at improving the performance of this application using Glasgow Parallel Haskell. The accident application is one of several large parallel Haskell programs under development at Glasgow. Our objective is to achieve wall-clock speedups over the best sequential implementations, and we report modest wallclock speedups for a demonstration program. From experience with these and other programs the group is developing a methodology for parallelising large functional programs. We have also developed strategies, a mechanism to separately specify a function’s algorithm and its dynamic behaviour.
An efficient instantiation algorithm for simulating radiant energy transfer in plant models

We describe a complete lighting simulation system tailored for the difficult case of vegetation scenes. Our algorithm is based on hierarchical instantiation for radiosity and precise phase function modeling. It allows efficient calculations both in terms of computation and memory resources. We provide an in-depth description and study of the instantiation-based radiosity technique and we address the problems related to generating and managing phase functions of plant structures, as needed by the instantiation process. We present results demonstrating the high performance of the hierarchical instantiation algorithm and we describe two examples of applications: rendering of large vegetation scenes and plant growth simulation. Other applications of our system range from landscape simulation to agronomical and agricultural studies, and to the design of virtual plants responding to their environment.
Automatic Generation of Security Protocols Implementations: (Extended Abstract)

The implementation of security protocols is challenging and error-prone. A model-driven development approach allows the automatic generation of an application, from a simpler and abstract model that can be formally verified. Our AnBx compiler is a tool for automatic generation of Java code of security protocols specified in the Alice&Bob notation. In contrast with existing tools, it uses a simpler specification language and computes the consistency checks that agents have to perform on reception of messages. Moreover, the tool applies various optimization strategies to achieve efficiency both at compile and run time. The implementation of security protocols is challenging and error-prone, as experience has shown that even widely used and heavily tested protocols like TLS and SSH need to be patched every year due to low-level implementation bugs. Moreover, bugs like “Heartbleed” (OpenSSL) [1] and“goto fail” (Apple TLS implementation) [2] have shown that missing (or untested) checks, hidden deep in the code, may have a severe impact. The critical aspect is that the highlevel security properties of a protocol must be hard-coded explicitly, in terms of low-level cryptographic operations and checks of well-formedness. To counter this problem, we propose a model-driven development approach that allows for automatic generation of an application, from a simpler and abstract model that can be formally verified. Our AnBx Compiler and Code Generator [3], is a tool for automatic generation of Java code of security protocols specified in the popular Alice & Bob notation, suitable for agile prototyping. From the design perspective, working on a simplified abstract model has proven to be very effective. It not only allows reasoning about the high-level security property, abstracting from the low-level details of the cryptographic implementation, but it also helps to reduce the problem to a size that can be handled efficiently by automatic verification tools. However, in order to build robust implementations, it is necessary to define explicitly which (defensive) consistency checks on the received data need to be performed to verify that the protocol is running according to the specification. It is important to recognize that while some checks on reception are trivially derived 1 Available at http://www.dais. unive.it/~modesti/anbx/
Access patterns and integrity constraints revisited

We consider which queries are answerable in the presence of access restrictions and integrity constraints, and which portions of the schema are accessible in the presence of access restrictions and constraints. Unlike prior work, we focus on integrity constraint languages that subsume inclusion dependencies. We also use a semantic definition of answerability: a query is answerable if the accessible information is sufficient to determine its truth value. We show that answerability is decidable for the class of guarded dependencies, which includes all inclusion dependencies, and also for constraints given in the guarded fragment of first-order logic. We also show that answerable queries have "query plans" in a restricted language. We give corresponding results for extractability of portions of the schema. Our results relate querying with limited access patterns, determinacy-vs-rewriting, and analysis of guarded constraints.
Population Size and Rates of Language Change

Abstract Previous empirical studies of population size and language change have produced equivocal results. We therefore address the question with a new set of lexical data from nearly one-half of the world's languages. We first show that relative population sizes of modern languages can be extrapolated to ancestral languages, albeit with diminishing accuracy, up to several thousand years into the past. We then test for an effect of population against the null hypothesis that the ultrametric inequality is satisfied by lexical distances among triples of related languages. The test shows mainly negligible effects of population, the exception being an apparently faster rate of change in the larger of two closely related variants. A possible explanation for the exception may be the influence on emerging standard (or cross-regional) variants from speakers who shift from different dialects to the standard. Our results strongly indicate that the sizes of speaker populations do not in and of themselves determine rates of language change. Comparison of this empirical finding with previously published computer simulations suggests that the most plausible model for language change is one in which changes propagate on a local level in a type of network in which the individuals have different degrees of connectivity.
Clustering test cases to achieve effective and scalable prioritisation incorporating expert knowledge

Pair-wise comparison has been successfully utilised in order to prioritise test cases by exploiting the rich, valuable and unique knowledge of the tester. However, the prohibitively large cost of the pair-wise comparison method prevents it from being applied to large test suites. In this paper, we introduce a cluster-based test case prioritisation technique. By clustering test cases, based on their dynamic runtime behaviour, we can reduce the required number of pair-wise comparisons significantly. The approach is evaluated on seven test suites ranging in size from 154 to 1,061 test cases. We present an empirical study that shows that the resulting prioritisation is more effective than existing coverage-based prioritisation techniques in terms of rate of fault detection. Perhaps surprisingly, the paper also demonstrates that clustering (even without human input) can outperform unclustered coverage-based technologies, and discusses an automated process that can be used to determine whether the application of the proposed approach would yield improvement.
The Tbx2+ Primary Myocardium of the Atrioventricular Canal Forms the Atrioventricular Node and the Base of the Left Ventricle

The primary myocardium of the embryonic heart, including the atrioventricular canal and outflow tract, is essential for septation and valve formation. In the chamber-forming heart, the expression of the T-box transcription factor Tbx2 is restricted to the primary myocardium. To gain insight into the cellular contributions of the Tbx2+ primary myocardium to the components of the definitive heart, genetic lineage tracing was performed using a novel Tbx2Cre allele. These analyses revealed that progeny of Tbx2+ cells provide an unexpectedly large contribution to the Tbx2-negative ventricles. Contrary to common assumption, we found that the embryonic left ventricle only forms the left part of the definitive ventricular septum and the apex. The atrioventricular node, but not the atrioventricular bundle, was found to derive from Tbx2+ cells. The Tbx2+ outflow tract formed the right ventricle and right part of the ventricular septum. In Tbx2-deficient embryos, the left-sided atrioventricular canal was found to prematurely differentiate to chamber myocardium and to proliferate at increased rates similar to those of chamber myocardium. As a result, the atrioventricular junction and base of the left ventricle were malformed. Together, these observations indicate that Tbx2 temporally suppresses differentiation and proliferation of primary myocardial cells. A subset of these Tbx2Cre-marked cells switch off expression of Tbx2, which allows them to differentiate into chamber myocardium, to initiate proliferation, and to provide a large contribution to the ventricles. These findings imply that errors in the development of the early atrioventricular canal may affect a much larger region than previously anticipated, including the ventricular base.
On the Number of Search Queries Required for Internet Plagiarism Detection

Digital plagiarism detection tools have become an integral part of learning management systems in recent years. Discovering Internet plagiarism in student papers has attracted a lot of attention from both researchers and software developers since the beginning of the WWW phenomena. In this paper we discuss how the time performance of such search systems can be improved by reducing the number of search queries. The study shows that if a significant part of a paper was plagiarized from the publically available on-line sources, then only a relatively small number of search queries are required to reliably locate the possible source for detailed comparison and manual confirmation of plagiarism. Indeed, we show that a 5% selection is enough to find the source of plagiarized paper and using more than 40% of the text in the search queries does not improve the search results. These findings help us to recommend the default search parameters for a plagiarism detection plug-in for open source course management systems reduces the time required for querying the search engine thus decreasing the workload for the plagiarism detection system.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric Camera

We have constructed a large-format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The camera consists of two arrays, a photometric array that uses 30 2048 × 2048 SITe/Tektronix CCDs (24 μm pixels) with an effective imaging area of 720 cm2 and an astrometric array that uses 24 400 × 2048 CCDs with the same pixel size, which will allow us to tie bright astrometric standard stars to the objects imaged in the photometric camera. The instrument will be used to carry out photometry essentially simultaneously in five color bands spanning the range accessible to silicon detectors on the ground in the time-delay–and–integrate (TDI) scanning mode. The photometric detectors are arrayed in the focal plane in six columns of five chips each such that two scans cover a filled stripe 2. °5 wide. This paper presents engineering and technical details of the camera.
Whole‐exome sequencing defines the mutational landscape of pheochromocytoma and identifies KMT2D as a recurrently mutated gene

As subsets of pheochromocytomas (PCCs) lack a defined molecular etiology, we sought to characterize the mutational landscape of PCCs to identify novel gene candidates involved in disease development. A discovery cohort of 15 PCCs wild type for mutations in PCC susceptibility genes underwent whole‐exome sequencing, and an additional 83 PCCs served as a verification cohort for targeted sequencing of candidate mutations. A low rate of nonsilent single nucleotide variants (SNVs) was detected (6.1/sample). Somatic HRAS and EPAS1 mutations were observed in one case each, whereas the remaining 13 cases did not exhibit variants in established PCC genes. SNVs aggregated in apoptosis‐related pathways, and mutations in COSMIC genes not previously reported in PCCs included ZAN, MITF, WDTC1, and CAMTA1. Two somatic mutations and one constitutional variant in the well‐established cancer gene lysine (K)‐specific methyltransferase 2D (KMT2D, MLL2) were discovered in one sample each, prompting KMT2D screening using focused exome‐sequencing in the verification cohort. An additional 11 PCCs displayed KMT2D variants, of which two were recurrent. In total, missense KMT2D variants were found in 14 (11 somatic, two constitutional, one undetermined) of 99 PCCs (14%). Five cases displayed somatic mutations in the functional FYR/SET domains of KMT2D, constituting 36% of all KMT2D‐mutated PCCs. KMT2D expression was upregulated in PCCs compared to normal adrenals, and KMT2D overexpression positively affected cell migration in a PCC cell line. We conclude that KMT2D represents a recurrently mutated gene with potential implication for PCC development. © 2015 The Authors. Genes, Chromosomes & Cancer Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
2.2 Voltage and Timing Margins............................. 16

We describe CACTI-IO, an extension to CACTI that includes power, area and timing models for the IO and PHY of the off-chip memory interface for various server and mobile configurations. CACTI-IO enables quick design space exploration of the off-chip IO along with the DRAM and cache parameters. We describe the models added to CACTI-IO that help include the off-chip impact to the tradeoffs between memory capacity, bandwidth and power. This technical report also provides three standard configurations for the input parameters (DDR3, LPDDR2 and Wide-IO) and illustrates how the models can be modified for a custom configuration. The models are validated against SPICE simulations and show that we are within 0-15% error for different configurations. We also compare with measured results.
Group Key Establishment for Enabling Secure Multicast Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks Deployed for IoT Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a prominent fundamental technology of the Internet of Things (IoTs). Rather than device-to-device communications, group communications in the form of broadcasting and multicasting incur efficient message deliveries among resource-constrained sensor nodes in the IoT-enabled WSNs. Secure and efficient key management is in many cases used to protect the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of multicast messages. This paper develops two group key establishment protocols for secure multicast communications among the resource-constrained devices in IoT. Major deployment conditions and requirements of each protocol are described in terms of the specific IoT application scenarios. Furthermore, the applicability of the two protocols is analyzed and justified by a comprehensive analysis of the performance, scalability, and security of the protocols proposed.