Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The association of an adenine insertion variant in the 5’UTR of the endothelin-1 gene with hypertension and orthostatic hypotension

Introduction An adenine insertion polymorphism in the 5’ untranslated region of the endothelin-1 gene is functional and increases the expression of endothelin mRNA and protein in the insertion homozygote. In the present study we hypothesized that this functional polymorphism might be associated with hypertension and/or orthostatic hypotension. Material and methods The adenine insertion polymorphism was genotyped in 381 untreated hypertensive patients and 298 normotensive subjects, all of whom underwent an upright posture study for orthostatic blood pressure measurements. Orthostatic hypotension was defined as a drop in blood pressure of 20/10 mm Hg or more within 3 min of assuming the upright posture. Results The allele frequency of the adenine insertion was similar in hypertensive and normotensive subjects (15.2% vs. 15.3%, p > 0.05). After adjustment for age, sex and body mass index, blood pressure levels did not differ significantly among the genotypes in both hypertensives and normotensives. No associations were found between the distribution of the adenine insertion genotypes and the risk of orthostatic hypotension in both hypertensive patients and normotensive subjects even after adjustment for demographic parameters and supine systolic or diastolic blood pressure. Neither hypertensive nor normotensive subjects showed significant differences in orthostatic systolic or diastolic blood pressure changes among the genotype groups (all p > 0.05). Conclusions We concluded that the functional adenine insertion polymorphism in the endothelin-1 gene is not associated with either hypertension or orthostatic hypotension risk in Chinese.
Quantization and Greed are Good: One bit Phase Retrieval, Robustness and Greedy Refinements

In this paper, we study the problem of robust phase recovery. We investigate a novel approach based on extremely quantized (one-bit) phase-less measurements and a corresponding recovery scheme. The proposed approach has surprising robustness and stability properties and, unlike currently available methods, allows to efficiently perform phase recovery from measurements affected by severe (possibly unknown) non-linear perturbations, such as distortions (e.g. clipping). Beyond robustness, we show how our approach can be used within greedy approaches based on alternating minimization. In particular, we propose novel initialization schemes for the alternating minimization achieving favorable convergence properties with improved sample complexity.
Supersymmetric States in M 5 / M 2 CFTs

We propose an exact, finite N formula for the partition function over 1/4 BPS states in the conformal field theory on the world volume of N coincident M5 branes, and 1/8 BPS states in the theory of N conincident M2 branes. We obtain our partition function by performing the radial quantization of the Coulomb Branches of these theories and rederive the same formula from the quantization of supersymmetric giant and dual giant gravitons in AdS7×S and AdS4×S. Our partition function is qualitatively similar to the analogous quantity in N = 4 Yang Mills. It reduces to the sum over supersymmetric multi gravitons at low energies, but deviates from this supergravity formula at energies that scale like a positive power of N .
The PM22I Interconnection Network

A scheme based on the standard multiplier recoding technique that enables the use of (5*5) switches for PM2I networks is presented. The connections between switching stages are based on the modified PM2I functions, and are called plus-minus-2/sup 2i/ (PM22I); hence, these networks are called the PM22I networks. Since the number of switching stages in the PM22I networks is one-half of those in the PM2I networks, with a moderate increase in the switch size from (3*3) to (5*5), these networks provide similar design tradeoffs availability by the (2*2) and (4*4) cube networks. >
Efficient reasoning on large SHIN Aboxes in relational databases

As applications based on semantic web technologies enter the mainstream, there is a need to provide highly efficient ontology reasoning over large Aboxes. However, achieving sufficient scalability is still a challenge, especially for expressive ontologies. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach which combines a fast, incomplete reasoning algorithm with a slower complete reasoning algorithm to handle the more expressive features of DL. Our approach works for SHIN . We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on large datasets (30-60 million assertions), including a clinical-trial patient matching application, where we show significant performance gains (an average of 15 mins per query compared to 100 mins) without sacrificing completeness or expressivity. keywords: Reasoning, Description Logic, Ontology.
Impact behavior and energy transfer efficiency of pulse-driven bent-beam electrothermal actuators

This paper investigates the dynamics of bent-beam electrothermal actuators and their use in impact actuation of other micromechanical elements, and in particular the issue of energy efficiency achieved by temporal variations in electrical drive signals. A transient thermal model of an actuator beam shows that the uniformity of temperature profile is greater when activating with short electrical pulses, which results in larger achievable displacements and forces. A dynamic force analysis reveals that using a train of pulses, referred to as a burst pulse, for activation achieves significant impact forces due to high velocities at the point of impact. The analytical trends are confirmed through experimental observations of microfabricated metal test structures in which actuators work against bistable mechanisms. Measurements of 2 mm and 3mm long actuators show that pulsed activation results in >5/spl times/ reduction in energy consumption, with the activation energy falling from over 1000 /spl mu/J at dc activation, to less than 200 /spl mu/J using a 0.2-ms voltage pulse. The actuators however consume higher instantaneous power levels at shorter pulses, which may inhibit the use of pulses less than 1 ms in width. Further, the energy consumption through burst activation is 70% that of a single pulse, if sufficient impact forces are generated.
A spatial awareness framework for enhancing game agent behaviour

We describe a framework for providing game agents with awareness of the intrinsic spatial qualities of the virtual worlds that they inhabit. We develop a novel data structure based on a modified medial axis, which establishes a mapping between the medial axis and world structures. This data structure can be used to perform queries about the width, curvature and connectivity of a space within a virtual world. Additional information, such as sampled visibility can also be integrated with this framework. An agent-based crowd simulation is adapted to make use of the sensory information provided by this data structure and the success of using this information within two game scenarios is evaluated.
Trm11p and Trm112p Are both Required for the Formation of 2-Methylguanosine at Position 10 in Yeast tRNA

ABSTRACT N 2 -Monomethylguanosine-10 (m2G10) and N 2 ,N 2 -dimethylguanosine-26 (m2 2G26) are the only two guanosine modifications that have been detected in tRNA from nearly all archaea and eukaryotes but not in bacteria. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, formation of m2 2G26 is catalyzed by Trm1p, and we report here the identification of the enzymatic activity that catalyzes the formation of m2G10 in yeast tRNA. It is composed of at least two subunits that are associated in vivo: Trm11p (Yol124c), which is the catalytic subunit, and Trm112p (Ynr046w), a putative zinc-binding protein. While deletion of TRM11 has no detectable phenotype under laboratory conditions, deletion of TRM112 leads to a severe growth defect, suggesting that it has additional functions in the cell. Indeed, Trm112p is associated with at least four proteins: two tRNA methyltransferases (Trm9p and Trm11p), one putative protein methyltransferase (Mtc6p/Ydr140w), and one protein with a Rossmann fold dehydrogenase domain (Lys9p/Ynr050c). In addition, TRM11 interacts genetically with TRM1, thus suggesting that the absence of m2G10 and m2 2G26 affects tRNA metabolism or functioning.
Iteratively reweighted least square for asymmetric L 2-Loss support vector regression

Abstract In support vector regression (SVR) model, using the squared -insensitive loss function makes the objective function of the optimization problem strictly convex and yields a more concise solution. However, the formulation leads to a quadratic programing which is expensive to solve. This paper reformulates the optimization problem by absorbing the constraints in the objective function, and the new formulation shares similarity with weighted least square regression problem. Based on this formulation, we propose an iteratively reweighted least square approach to train the L 2-loss SVR, for both linear and nonlinear models. The proposed approach is easy to implement, without requiring any additional computing package other than basic linear algebra operations. Numerical studies on real-world datasets show that, compared to the alternatives, the proposed approach can achieve similar prediction accuracy with substantially higher time efficiency.
Traversing the context of professional learning communities: development and implementation of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge of a primary science teacher

ABSTRACT Background: Professional learning communities are increasingly recognized for their significance in building teachers’ competencies for educational reform. However, the knowledge development cycle of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) through multiple professional learning communities is not well researched. Purpose: This qualitative case study investigates a primary science teacher’s TPACK development in the context of two interdependent learning spaces: a joint-school and a within-school professional learning community. The school’s organizational and sociocultural influences on teacher learning are also examined. Participant: Teacher Sean (pseudonym) embarked on a science innovation project after two years of teaching in a Singapore mainstream school. He was tasked to integrate mobile-based inquiry learning and visible thinking pedagogical approaches, and to pilot the designed lessons for a primary three class. Design and methods: A case-study approach involving multiple sources of data with cultural historical activity theory as the analytical lens was employed, to unpack the complementary and contradictory interactions across different interrelated activity systems. The purpose was to understand the (mis)alignments within and between the two professional learning communities. Results: The findings indicate that Sean’s (subject) learning from the joint-school professional learning community to the within-school professional learning community faced multiple tensions that hindered his TPACK development (object). He faced difficulty in manipulating tools (technology and visible thinking routines) to translate the joint-school co-designed lessons into classroom implementation. Additionally, the volatility of the school’s organizational routines (rules) and the lack of communicative leader–teacher partnership (division of labor) did not afford sufficient infrastructure or instructional support. Conclusions: Interactions between the teacher’s personal and contextual factors inhibited the designed TPACK from being implemented successfully. For ambitious pedagogical undertakings as illustrated in this case, more perceptive and synergistic organizational design thinking is needed to support beginning teachers’ TPACK development.
Quantifying Cost-Effectiveness of Controlling Nosocomial Spread of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria: The Case of MRSA

Background The costs and benefits of controlling nosocomial spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are unknown. Methods We developed a mathematical algorithm to determine cost-effectiveness of infection control programs and explored the dynamical interactions between different epidemiological variables and cost-effectiveness. The algorithm includes occurrence of nosocomial infections, attributable mortality, costs and efficacy of infection control and how antibiotic-resistant bacteria affect total number of infections: do infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria replace infections caused by susceptible bacteria (replacement scenario) or occur in addition to them (addition scenario). Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia was used for illustration using observational data on S. aureus bacteremia (SAB) in our hospital (n = 189 between 2001–2004, all being methicillin-susceptible S. aureus [MSSA]). Results In the replacement scenario, the costs per life year gained range from € 45,912 to € 6590 for attributable mortality rates ranging from 10% to 50%. Using € 20,000 per life year gained as a threshold, completely preventing MRSA would be cost-effective in the replacement scenario if attributable mortality of MRSA is ≥21%. In the addition scenario, infection control would be cost saving along the entire range of estimates for attributable mortality. Conclusions Cost-effectiveness of controlling antibiotic-resistant bacteria is highly sensitive to the interaction between infections caused by resistant and susceptible bacteria (addition or replacement) and attributable mortality. In our setting, controlling MRSA would be cost saving for the addition scenario but would not be cost-effective in the replacement scenario if attributable mortality would be <21%.
Comparative Study of Esterase and Hemolytic Activities in Clinically Important Candida Species, Isolated From Oral Cavity of Diabetic and Non-diabetic Individuals

Background: Diabetes mellitus as a chronic metabolic disease occurs in patients with partial or complete deficiency of insulin secretion or disorder in action of insulin on tissue. The disease is known to provide conditions for overgrowth of Candida species. Candida spp. cause candidiasis by many virulence factors such as esterase, hemolysin and phospholipase. Objectives: This study aimed to compare esterase and hemolytic activity in various Candida species isolated from oral cavity of diabetic and non-diabetic individuals. Patients and Methods: Swab samples were taken from 95 patients with diabetes (35 men and 60 women) and 95 normal persons (42 men and 53 women) and cultured on Sabouraud dextrose agar. Identification of isolated yeasts was performed by germ tube test, morphology on CHROMagar Candida medium, corn meal agar and ability to grow at 45°C. Hemolysin activity was evaluated using blood plate assay and esterase activity was determined using the Tween 80 opacity test. Results: Different Candida species were isolated from 57 (60%) diabetic and 24 (25%) non-diabetic individuals. Esterase activity was detected in all Candida isolates. Only 21.6% of C. albicans from patients with diabetes had esterase activity as + 3, while it ranged from + 1 to + 2 in others. Hemolytic activity was determined in C. albicans, C. dubliniensis, C. glabrata and C. krusei as 0.79, 0.58, 0.66 and 0.74, respectively. Hemolytic activity was significantly different in the two groups of diabetics and non-diabetics. Conclusions: Oral carriage of C. albicans in the diabetic group (n = 42; 66.7%) was significantly greater than the control group (n = 16; 57.1%). Esterase activity of C. albicans in diabetic group was higher than non-diabetic group. Although C. albicans remains the most frequently pathogenic yeast for human, but other species are increasing.
Low Power Design for a Multi-core Multi-thread Microprocessor

Power efficiency of microprocessor is essential to green computing. As most microprocessors become multi-core and multi-thread, it's important to study low power design for them. The architecture of MCMT, a multi-core multi-thread microprocessor, is described briefly in this paper. Several low power design techniques, including fine-grained clock gating, instruction throttling and adaptive L2 cache are presented to reduce both the dynamic power and the leakage power. Experimental results show that the presented techniques can meet the power constraints.
Severe Adenine Starvation Activates Ty1 Transcription and Retrotransposition in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT Ty1 retrotransposons of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are activated by different kinds of stress. Here we show that Ty1 transcription is stimulated under severe adenine starvation conditions. The Bas1 transcriptional activator, responsible for the induction of genes of the de novo AMP biosynthesis pathway (ADE) in the absence of adenine, is not involved in this response. Activation occurs mainly on Ty1 elements, whose expression is normally repressed by chromatin and is suppressed in a hta1-htb1Δ mutant that alters chromatin structure. Activation is also abolished in a snf2Δ mutant. Several regions of the Ty1 promoter are necessary to achieve full activation, suggesting that full integrity of the promoter sequences might be important for activation. Together, these observations are consistent with a model in which the activation mechanism involves chromatin remodeling at Ty1 promoters. The consequence of Ty1 transcriptional activation in response to adenine starvation is an increase in Ty1 cDNA levels and a relief of Ty1 dormancy. The retrotransposition of four native Ty1 elements increases in proportion to their increase in transcription. Implications for the regulation of Ty1 mobility by changes in Ty1 mRNA levels are discussed.
Optimising Sensor Layouts for Direct Measurement of Discrete Variables

An optimal sensor layout is attained when a limited number of sensors are placed in an area such that the cost of the placement is minimized while the value of the obtained information is maximized. In this paper, we discuss the optimal sensor layout design problem from first principles, show how an existing optimization criterion (maximum entropy of the measured variables) can be derived, and compare the performance of this criterion with three others that have been reported in the literature for a specific situation for which we have detailed experimental data available. This is achieved by firstly learning a spatial model of the environment using a Bayesian Network, then predicting the expected sensor data in the rest of the space, and finally verifying the predicted results with the experimental measurements. The development of rigorous techniques for optimizing sensor layouts is argued to be an essential requirement for reconfigurable and self-adaptive networks.
Dense mode clustering in brain maps B

A mode-based clustering method is developed for identifying spatially dense clusters in brain maps. This type of clustering focuses on identifying clusters in brain maps independent of their shape or overall variance. This can be useful for both localization in terms of interpretation and for subsequent graphical analysis that might require more coherent or dense regions of interest as starting points. The method automatically does signal/noise sharpening through density mode seeking. We also discuss the problem of parameter selection with this method and propose a new method involving 2-parameter control surface, in which we show that the same cluster solution results from tradeoff of these 2 parameters (the local density k and the radius r of the spherical kernel). We benchmark the new dense mode clustering by using several artificially created data sets and brain imaging data sets from an event perception task by perturbing the data set with noise and measuring three kinds of deviation from the original cluster solution. We present benchmark results that demonstrate that the mode clustering method consistently outperforms the commonly used single-linkage clustering, k means method (centroid method) and Ward’s method (variance method). D 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A multilevel spectral hypergraph partitioning approach for color image segmentation

In many image processing applications, and in the human visual system, relationships among objects of interest are more complex than pairwise. Simply approximating complex relationships as pairwise ones can lead to loss of information. A natural way to describe complex relationships, without loss of information, is to use hypergraphs. In this paper, we use a Color Image Neighborhood Hypergraph representation (CINH), which extracts all features and their consistencies in the image data and whose mode of use is close to the perceptual grouping. We formulate a color image segmentation problem as a CINH partitioning problem. A new multilevel spectral hypergraph partitioning approach is presented. Our experiments on the Berkeley images database showed encouraging results compared with the graph partitioning strategy based on Normalized Cut (NCut) criteria.
Prevalence and Genetic Diversity Analysis of Human Coronavirus OC43 among Adult Patients with Acute Respiratory Infections in Beijing, 2012

To determine the prevalence, epidemiology and genetic diversity of human coronavirus OC43 (HCoV-OC43) among adult patients with acute respiratory infections (ARI) in Beijing,five hundred and fifty-nine nasopharyngeal swab samples were collected from adult patients with ARI in Beijing. The prevalence of HCoV-OC43 infection among these patients was assessed using two different OneStep reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays. The epidemiological profiles of the patients with HCoV-OC43 infection were described. Partial S and N genes of HCoV-OC43 circulating strains were sequenced followed by phylogenetic analysis and amino acid alignment. Our results showed that the prevalence of HCoV-OC43 infection was 12.52% (95% CI: 9.78–15.26%), and the epidemic peak occurred in autumn. Fifty partial S and 40 partial N fragments were obtained from these patients. Phylogenetic analysis based on neighbour-joining method showed that at least three distinct clusters (A, B, C/D) of HCoV-OC43 strains were circulating among adult patients with ARI in Beijing. In addition, some novel unique clusters (UNT) of HCoV-OC43 were found in the S- and N-based phylogenetic trees. Furthermore, consensus amino acids substitutes for each cluster were also found after alignment of partial S or N sequence coding region in this study. In conclusion, we herein describe the prevalence of HCoV-OC43 among adult patients and provide substantial evidence for the genetic diversity of HCoV-OC43 circulating in Beijing.
A WWW-Accessible Database for 3D Vision Research

Reproducibility and thorough experimental evaluation are essential elemen ts of the dissemination of systems, including the systems developed for object recognition by comput er vision researchers. Systems tested on widely used image databases are more directly comparable than systems which are tested on customized data. This paper describes the components of an evolving database of 3D object mod ls, 3D (range) images, and code to support research in and evaluation of model-based object recogniti on a d range image analysis systems. Images and models are available in a variety of geometric formats ( e.g., VRML, GIF as well as documented neutral formats) and the entire database can be browsed and retriev ed through the World Wide Web.
Robust shape recovery for sparse contact location and normal data from haptic exploration

3D shape reconstruction of objects from tactile exploration data acquired by a multi-fingered robot hand is an important skill for a humanoid robot system. Tactile exploration data captured using current robot technology is naturally sparse and noisy, therefore a satisfying shape estimate is difficult to achieve. In this paper we describe a robust approach for 3D shape recovery using superquadric functions, which makes use of both contact location and normal information. We present two quality measures and compare to other relevant estimation techniques using representative synthetic contact data.