Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
River Ecology and Flood Hazard Mitigation

Flooding remains the most common and one of the most costly categories of natural hazards in the United States. Historically, the United States has relied on structural mitigation, insurance, and disaster relief to mitigate the harm done by floods. However, experience has shown that structural mitigation and related policies can fail to protect lives and property while also contributing to the degradation of the riverine environment. We review flood hazard mitigation policy, describe some of the environmental damage associated with current policies, and review current policy proposals to outline ways to mitigate the flood hazard without promoting catastrophic losses and environmental damage.
XAF1 is frequently methylated in human esophageal cancer.

AIM To explore epigenetic changes in the gene encoding X chromosome-linked inhibitor of apoptosis-associated factor 1 (XAF1) during esophageal carcinogenesis. METHODS Methylation status of XAF1 was detected by methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MSP) in four esophageal cancer cell lines (KYSE30, KYSE70, BIC1 and partially methylated in TE3 cell lines), nine cases of normal mucosa, 72 cases of primary esophageal cancer and matched adjacent tissue. XAF1 expression was examined by semi-quantitative reverse transcriptional polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting before and after treatment with 5-aza-deoxycytidine (5-aza-dc), a demethylating agent. To investigate the correlation of XAF1 expression and methylation status in primary esophageal cancer, immunohistochemistry for XAF1 expression was performed in 32 cases of esophageal cancer and matched adjacent tissue. The association of methylation status and clinicopathological data was analyzed by logistic regression. RESULTS MSP results were as follows: loss of XAF1 expression was found in three of four esophageal cell lines with promoter region hypermethylation (completely methylated in KYSE30, KYSE70 and BIC1 cell lines and partially in TE3 cells); all nine cases of normal esophageal mucosa were unmethylated; and 54/72 (75.00%) samples from patients with esophageal cancer were methylated, and 25/72 (34.70%) matched adjacent tissues were methylated (75.00% vs 34.70%, χ(2) = 23.5840, P = 0.000). mRNA level of XAF1 measured with semi-quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction was detectable only in TE3 cells, and no expression was detected in KYSE30, KYSE70 or BIC1 cells. Protein expression was not observed in KYSE30 cells by Western blotting before treatment with 5-aza-dc. After treatment, mRNA level of XAF1 was detectable in KYSE30, KYSE70 and BIC1 cells. Protein expression was detected in KYSE30 after treatment with 5-aza-dc. Immunohistochemistry was performed on 32 cases of esophageal cancer and adjacent tissue, and demonstrated XAF1 in the nucleus and cytoplasm. XAF1 staining was found in 20/32 samples of adjacent normal tissue but was present in only 8/32 samples of esophageal cancer tissue (χ(2)= 9.143, P = 0.002). XAF1 expression was decreased in cancer samples compared with adjacent tissues. In 32 cases of esophageal cancer, 24/32 samples were methylated, and 8/32 esophageal cancer tissues were unmethylated. XAF1 staining was found in 6/8 samples of unmethylated esophageal cancer and 2/24 samples of methylated esophageal cancer tissue. XAF1 staining was inversely correlated with XAF1 promoter region methylation (Fisher's exact test, P = 0.004). Regarding methylation status and clinicopathological data, no significant differences were found in sex, age, tumor size, tumor stage, or metastasis with respect to methylation of XAF1 for the 72 tissue samples from patients with esophageal cancer. CONCLUSION XAF1 is frequently methylated in esophageal cancer, and XAF1 expression is regulated by promoter region hypermethylation.
Comparative effectiveness of azithromycin for treating scrub typhus

Background: Scrub typhus is a zoonotic disease that remains an important health threat in endemic areas. Appropriate anti-rickettsial treatment ensures a successful recovery. Doxycycline is a recommended drug, but it is contraindicated in pregnant women and young children. Azithromycin is a safer alternative drug, but its effectiveness remains largely unclear. Herein, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine the effectiveness of azithromycin. Methods: Studies that investigated azithromycin in treating scrub typhus were systematically identified from electronic databases up to December 2016. Information regarding study population, disease severity, treatment protocols, and responses was extracted and analyzed. Results: In this review, 5 studies were included, which comprised a total of 427 patients. When comparing the treatment failure rate, we observed a favorable outcome in patients treated with azithromycin (risk ratio [RR] 0.83, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.23–2.98). However, patients in the azithromycin group had longer time to defervescence (mean difference 4.38 hours, 95% CI −2.51 to 11.27) and higher rate of fever for more than 48 hours (RR 1.31, 95% CI 0.81–2.12). Moreover, patients treated with azithromycin had less adverse effects (RR 0.8, 95% CI 0.42–1.52). Conclusions: Azithromycin is as effective as other anti-rickettsial drugs with higher treatment success rates, lower frequency of adverse effects, and longer time to defervescence (GRADE 2B). Therefore, it is reasonable to use azithromycin as the first-line treatment against scrub typhus. Further studies are warranted to elucidate the effectiveness of azithromycin in specific patient groups, at high dose and influence of drug resistance.
Temporal Data-Driven Sleep Scheduling and Spatial Data-Driven Anomaly Detection for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

The spatial–temporal correlation is an important feature of sensor data in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of the existing works based on the spatial–temporal correlation can be divided into two parts: redundancy reduction and anomaly detection. These two parts are pursued separately in existing works. In this work, the combination of temporal data-driven sleep scheduling (TDSS) and spatial data-driven anomaly detection is proposed, where TDSS can reduce data redundancy. The TDSS model is inspired by transmission control protocol (TCP) congestion control. Based on long and linear cluster structure in the tunnel monitoring system, cooperative TDSS and spatial data-driven anomaly detection are then proposed. To realize synchronous acquisition in the same ring for analyzing the situation of every ring, TDSS is implemented in a cooperative way in the cluster. To keep the precision of sensor data, spatial data-driven anomaly detection based on the spatial correlation and Kriging method is realized to generate an anomaly indicator. The experiment results show that cooperative TDSS can realize non-uniform sensing effectively to reduce the energy consumption. In addition, spatial data-driven anomaly detection is quite significant for maintaining and improving the precision of sensor data.
Predation by Bears Drives Senescence in Natural Populations of Salmon

Classic evolutionary theory predicts that populations experiencing higher rates of environmentally caused (“extrinsic”) mortality should senesce more rapidly, but this theory usually neglects plausible relationships between an individual's senescent condition and its susceptibility to extrinsic mortality. We tested for the evolutionary importance of this condition dependence by comparing senescence rates among natural populations of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) subject to varying degrees of predation by brown bears (Ursus arctos). We related senescence rates in six populations to (1) the overall rate of extrinsic mortality, and (2) the degree of condition dependence in this mortality. Senescence rates were determined by modeling the mortality of individually-tagged breeding salmon at each site. The overall rate of extrinsic mortality was estimated as the long-term average of the annual percentage of salmon killed by bears. The degree of condition dependence was estimated as the extent to which bears killed salmon that exhibited varying degrees of senescence. We found that the degree of condition dependence in extrinsic mortality was very important in driving senescence: populations where bears selectively killed fish showing advanced senescence were those that senesced least rapidly. The overall rate of extrinsic mortality also contributed to among-population variation in senescence-but to a lesser extent. Condition-dependent susceptibility to extrinsic mortality should be incorporated more often into theoretical models and should be explicitly tested in natural populations.
Scalability in Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a new privacy preserving data aggregation scheme for WSNs. Our scheme applies additive property of complex numbers in order to combine sensor data and preserve data privacy during transmission to the sink node. In addition, for supporting scalability, we propose a novel mechanism in which a special set of real numbers are assigned to sensor nodes as their IDs so that a single bit is sufficient to hold ID of a sensor node during transmission of aggregated data to the sink node. For this, we, first, generate fixed size signatures for the IDs of all sensor nodes and then superimpose the signatures during data aggregation phase. By analytical evaluations, we show that our scheme is more scalable and energy efficient than the existing methods to achieve data privacy and transmit IDs of sensor nodes along with the aggregated data to the sink node.
Why and How to Pay Different Attention to Phrase Alignments of Different Intensities

This work studies comparatively two typical sentence pair classification tasks: textual entailment (TE) and answer selection (AS), observing that phrase alignments of different intensities contribute differently in these tasks. We address the problems of identifying phrase alignments of flexible granularity and pooling alignments of different intensities for these tasks. Examples for flexible granularity are alignments between two single words, between a single word and a phrase and between a short phrase and a long phrase. By intensity we roughly mean the degree of match, it ranges from identity over surface-form co-occurrence, rephrasing and other semantic relatedness to unrelated words as in lots of parenthesis text. Prior work (i) has limitations in phrase generation and representation, or (ii) conducts alignment at word and phrase levels by handcrafted features or (iii) utilizes a single attention mechanism over alignment intensities without considering the characteristics of specific tasks, which limits the system's effectiveness across tasks. We propose an architecture based on Gated Recurrent Unit that supports (i) representation learning of phrases of arbitrary granularity and (ii) task-specific focusing of phrase alignments between two sentences by attention pooling. Experimental results on TE and AS match our observation and are state-of-the-art.
Weaving aspects into Web service orchestrations

Web service orchestration engines need to be more open to enable the addition of new features into service-based applications. In this paper, we illustrate how, in a BPEL engine with aspect-weaving capabilities, a process-driven application based on the Google Web service can be dynamically adapted with new features and hot-fixed to meet unforeseen post-deployment requirements. Business processes (the application skeletons) can be enriched with additional features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or an application-specific GUI. Dynamic aspects are also used on the processes themselves to tackle the problem of hot-fixes to long running processes. In this manner, composing a Web service 'on-the-fly' means weaving its choreography interface into the business process.
Designing a model for implementing knowledge management in project-based organizations: Case study of PATSA Co.

In 21st century, knowledge is known as one of the most significant resources of organizations.Researchers and experts are trying to figure out the ways to accumulate and manage knowledge sources in order to maintain the firm’s competitive advantage.In project-based organizations, the knowledge gained at the end of each project, plays a leading role for the success of the organization in further projects.Nowadays, an increasing interest in knowledge management arena exists in organizations and there are numerous researchers who have posed different models for effective implementation of a KM system.We have focused on project-based organizations in which KM plays a crucial role, and developed a model for implementing KM.An exploratory qualitative research was used to develop the model and it was validated with a single case study on a leading ICT company of Iran.
Transcript Profiling of Elf5+/− Mammary Glands during Pregnancy Identifies Novel Targets of Elf5

Background Elf5, an epithelial specific Ets transcription factor, plays a crucial role in the pregnancy-associated development of the mouse mammary gland. Elf5−/− embryos do not survive, however the Elf5+/− mammary gland displays a severe pregnancy-associated developmental defect. While it is known that Elf5 is crucial for correct mammary development and lactation, the molecular mechanisms employed by Elf5 to exert its effects on the mammary gland are largely unknown. Principal Findings Transcript profiling was used to investigate the transcriptional changes that occur as a result of Elf5 haploinsufficiency in the Elf5 +/− mouse model. We show that the development of the mouse Elf5 +/− mammary gland is delayed at a transcriptional and morphological level, due to the delayed increase in Elf5 protein in these glands. We also identify a number of potential Elf5 target genes, including Mucin 4, whose expression, is directly regulated by the binding of Elf5 to an Ets binding site within its promoter. Conclusion We identify novel transcriptional targets of Elf5 and show that Muc4 is a direct target of Elf5, further elucidating the mechanisms through which Elf5 regulates proliferation and differentiation in the mammary gland.
Domain of Attraction Expansion for Physics-Based Character Control

Determining effective control strategies and solutions for high-degree-of-freedom humanoid characters has been a difficult, ongoing problem. A controller is only valid for a subset of the states of the character, known as the domain of attraction (DOA). This article shows how many states that are initially outside the DOA can be brought inside it. Our first contribution is to show how DOA expansion can be performed for a high-dimensional simulated character. Our second contribution is to present an algorithm that efficiently increases the DOA using random trees that provide denser coverage than the trees produced by typical sampling-based motion-planning algorithms. The trees are constructed offline but can be queried fast enough for near-real-time control. We show the effect of DOA expansion on getting up, crouch-to-stand, jumping, and standing-twist controllers. We also show how DOA expansion can be used to connect controllers together.
A Unified Framework for the Ergodic Capacity of Spectrum Sharing Cognitive Radio Systems

We consider a spectrum sharing communication scenario in which a primary and a secondary users are communicating, simultaneously, with their respective destinations using the same frequency carrier. Both optimal power profile and ergodic capacity are derived for fading channels, under an average transmit power and an instantaneous interference outage constraints. Unlike previous studies, we assume that the secondary user has a noisy version of the cross link and the secondary link Channel State Information (CSI). After deriving the capacity in this case, we provide an ergodic capacity generalization, through a unified expression, that encompasses several previously studied spectrum sharing settings. In addition, we provide an asymptotic capacity analysis at high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical results, applied for independent Rayleigh fading channels, show that at low SNR regime, only the secondary channel estimation matters with no effect of the cross link on the capacity; whereas at high SNR regime, the capacity is rather driven by the cross link CSI. Furthermore, a practical on-off power allocation scheme is proposed and is shown, through numerical results, to achieve the full capacity at high and low SNR regimes and suboptimal rates in the medium SNR regime.
Changes in reproductive roles are associated with changes in gene expression in fire ant queens

In species with social hierarchies, the death of dominant individuals typically upheaves the social hierarchy and provides an opportunity for subordinate individuals to become reproductives. Such a phenomenon occurs in the monogyne form of the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, where colonies typically contain a single wingless reproductive queen, thousands of workers and hundreds of winged nonreproductive virgin queens. Upon the death of the mother queen, many virgin queens shed their wings and initiate reproductive development instead of departing on a mating flight. Workers progressively execute almost all of them over the following weeks. To identify the molecular changes that occur in virgin queens as they perceive the loss of their mother queen and begin to compete for reproductive dominance, we collected virgin queens before the loss of their mother queen, 6 h after orphaning and 24 h after orphaning. Their RNA was extracted and hybridized against microarrays to examine the expression levels of approximately 10 000 genes. We identified 297 genes that were consistently differentially expressed after orphaning. These include genes that are putatively involved in the signalling and onset of reproductive development, as well as genes underlying major physiological changes in the young queens.
A Highly Linear 1-GHz CMOS Downconversion Mixer

A highly linear, closed loop CMOS architecture is demonstrated for the mixing of RF waveforms to baseband as sampled-data signals. In converting a 915 MHz RF waveform to a 20 MHz spread spectrum baseband signal, the measured third-order intercept lies at +27 dBm of input power. As the 1-¿m CMOS prototype dissipates only 12 mW from a 5V supply, and is capable of operation at 3V, it is expected to be of use in advanced handheld wireless receivers.
Photomask-edge-roughness characterization using an atomic force microscope

Photomask edge roughness metrology has historically been performed using optical techniques. However, current optical techniques fail to provide the necessary resolution to meet the requirements for reduced mask edge roughness driven by improved resolution of advanced wafer lithography systems. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has demonstrated the capability to provide the required physical characterization of printed mask features. At the macroscopic level, the critical dimensions (CDs) of linewidth, sidewall angle, and chrome thickness are measured using an attractive mode, critical dimension scanning algorithm with flared silicon tips. For localized examination of the line edge roughness, the system is operated with sharp conical tips (10 - 30 nm radius) scanned parallel to the profile edge. This new technique provides 10 - 30 nm resolution. In addition, Fourier analysis of the line edge roughness data can be used to identify periodic error signatures in the mask pattern generation.
Programmed translational −1 frameshifting on hexanucleotide motifs and the wobble properties of tRNAs

Programmed −1 ribosomal frameshifting, involving tRNA re‐pairing from an AAG codon to an AAA codon, has been reported to occur at the sequences CGA AAG and CAA AAG. In this study, using the recoding region of insertion sequence IS3, we have investigated the influence on frameshifting in Escherichia coli of the first codon of this type of motif by changing it to all other NNA codons. Two classes of NNA codons were distinguished, depending on whether they favor or limit frameshifting. Their degree of shiftiness is correlated with wobble propensity, and base 34 modification, of their decoding tRNAs. A more flexible anticodon loop very likely makes the tRNAs with extended wobble more prone to liberate the third codon base, A, for re‐pairing of tRNALys in the −1 frame.
NANO: A New Supervised Algorithm for Feature Selection with Discretization

Discretization turns numeric attributes into discrete ones. Feature selection eliminates some irrelevant and/or redundant attributes. Data discretization and feature selection are two important tasks that performed prior to the learning phase of data mining algorithms and significantly reduces the processing effort of the learning algorithm. In this paper, we present a new algorithm, called Nano, that can perform simultaneously data discretization and feature selection. In feature selection process irrelevant and redundant attributes as a measure of inconsistence are eliminated to determine the final number of intervals and to select features. The proposed Nano algorithm aims at keeping the minimal number of intervals with minimal inconsistency and establishes a tradeoff between these measures. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed Nano algorithm is effective in feature selection and discretization of numeric and ordinal attributes.
Mechanisms and high performances of chlorine-treated GaN ultraviolet photodetectors

A chlorination surface treatment was used to reduce the surface states of an n-type GaN surface, which improves the Schottky performances of the resultant metal-semiconductor contact. At a reverse bias of 10V, the dark current of the GaN-based UV-PDs with and without chlorinated surface treated were 28.1nA and 0. 59μA, respectively. The dark current of chlorine-treated Schottky UV-PDs was 21 times of magnitude smaller than that of those without chlorination treatment. The product of quantum efficiency and internal gain of the GaN Schottky UV-PDs without and with chlorination treatment under a reverse voltage of 10V at a wavelength of 330nm was 650% and 100%, respectively. The internal gain of chlorine-treated GaN UV-PDs can be reduced due to the improvement of surface state density.
Measurement and Detection of Nanoparticles Within the Environment

In order to assess possible environmental implications of nanoparticles, it is necessary to be able to detect and quantify nanoparticles in the corresponding matrix. Nanoparticles may be present in soil, water and air in the ambient and/or especially workplace environments where product nanoparticles are handled. Hence different measurement and sampling techniques are necessary in addition to task-specific strategies. This chapter discusses the above issues and explains the basic principles of the measurement techniques with a view to linking this information to environmental exposure of ecosystems, plants, animals and humans. A possible risk from nanoparticles may only occur and can only be assessed if the concentrations and characteristics of nanoparticles can be determined and quantified. Keywords: nanotechnology; nanoparticles; environment; exposure; measurement and detection methods; strategies