Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extraction of Spore-lytic Enzyme from Clostridiurn pefdngens Spores

Various chemical reagents known to extract spore coat protein were used to extract spore-lytic enzyme (SLE) from intact and germinated spores of Clostridium perfringens. Of the reagents tested, 7.2 M-Urea plus 10% (v/v) mercaptoethanol, pH 2.85, solubilized the most SLE activity per mg spores. The quantity of SLE extracted was dependent on the initial pH of the reagent, with a maximum between pH 2.7 and 3.0. Germinated spores yielded more SLE than non-germinated spores upon urea/mercaptoethanol extraction. SLE release during spore germination probably utilizes a trigger mechanism not satisfied by germination alone. Significant amounts of SLE were released during germination when spores were suspended in potassium chloride or a complex germinant mixture containing brain-heart infusion, yeast extract and chloramphenicol, but not during germination with sodium nitrite, which non-enzymically lysed the cortical peptidoglycan. Greater solubilization of SLE activity was obtained by urea/mercaptoethanol extraction of spores germinated with nitrite than of spores germinated with either potassium chloride or the complex germinant. Powell & Strange (1953) postulated the presence of an enzymic lytic system in bacterial spores and its role during germination. Since then, the spore-lytic enzymes of Bacillus cereus have been isolated and extensively studied by Strange & In most cases, this lytic system was found to hydrolyse the peptidoglycan of the spore cortex, resulting in germination-like changes in the spore. Warth (1972) found that B. cereus spores contain four separate cortex-degrading enzymes. Brown et al. (1977) reported that cortex-lytic activities were localized in both the core and in the coat fraction, and these could be isolated separately by particular extraction procedures. Further evidence for the association of cortex-lytic (germination) enzyme with the coat fraction follows from the observation that, in several cases, treatment of dormant spores with reagents which remove spore coat have resulted in a reduced ability of those spores to germinate. This has occurred with, for example, urea/mercaptoethanol (UME) treatment of BaciElus megaterium (Vary, 1973), alkaline dithioerythritol/sodium dodecyl sulphate treatment of B. cereus (Aronson & Fitz-James, 1976), dithiothreitol/urea or alkaline treatment of Clostridium bifermentans (Wyatt & Wakes, 1974), and alkaline treatment (Duncan et al., 1972) or alkaline dithiothreitol treatment of Clostridium perfringens (Labbe et al., 1978). These observations could be the result of the cortex-lytic enzymes being either solubilized and removed or simply inactivated by the treatments. Indeed, Brown et al. (1978) have extracted and purified a cortex-lytic enzyme from B. cereus spores using urea/mercaptoethanol and guanidine/mercaptoethanol. However, it …
Capacity lower bounds of IM/DD AWGN optical wireless channels based on Fano's inequality

Intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) is the most commonly applied scheme in optical wireless communication systems. There is no exact channel capacity expression for optical wireless communication systems in IM/DD additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, but capacity bounds exist. In this letter, channel capacity for optical wireless communications in the IM/DD AWGN channel is analyzed based on Fano's inequality, and peak-and-average optical power constraints are considered. New lower bounds, which are tight in the specific signal to noise ratio (SNR) region, are derived under two cases of peak-and-average optical power constraints. Besides, the lower bounds can be achieved in practical environment by using DC-biased M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) scheme.
Unobtrusive Sleep Stage Identification Using a Pressure-Sensitive Bed Sheet

Sleep constitutes a big portion of our lives and is a major part of health and well-being. Monitoring the quality of sleep can aid in the medical diagnosis of a variety of sleep and psychiatric disorders and can serve as an indication of several chronic diseases. Sleep stage analysis plays a pivotal role in the evaluation of the quality of sleep and is a proven biometric in diagnosing cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity [32]. We describe an unobtrusive framework for sleep stage identification based on a high-resolution pressure-sensitive e-textile bed sheet. We extract a set of sleep-related biophysical and geometric features from the bed sheet and use a two-phase classification procedure for Wake-Non Rapid Eye Movement-Rapid Eye Movement stage identification. A total of seven all-night polysomnography recordings from healthy subjects were used to validate the proposed bed sheet system and the ability to extract sleep stage information from it. When compared with the gold standard, the described system achieved 70.3% precision and 71.1% recall on average. These results suggest that unobtrusive sleep macrostructure analysis could be a viable option in clinical and home settings in the near future. Compared with existing techniques for sleep stage identification, the described system is unobtrusive, fits seamlessly into the user's familiar sleep environment, and has additional advantages of comfort, low cost, and simplicity.
Late Nineteenth Century Britain : A Social , Political , and Methodological Context for the Rise of Multivariate Statistics

George Udny Yule, student of Karl Pearson, is usually credited with the first complete multiple regression (Yule, 1899). And although this monumental work has been well documented by historians of statistics (e.g., see Desrosières, 1998; Stigler, 1986), the social, political, and methodological ambitions that gave rise to this project have been less recognized. In the present piece, we trace the earliest post-Galton seeds of multivariate innovation. In late nineteenth century, we get a first glimpse of how social and political influences merged with methodological and statistical concerns to inspire a new multivariate technique and extend on Galton’s bivariate correlation. Charles Stewart Loch, then secretary for the Charity Organization Society (C.O.S), responded to Charles Booth’s extensive and ground-breaking study The Aged Poor in England and Wales, and vehemently rejected conclusions surmised by Booth. In critically evaluating Booth’s methodology, we find that Loch played an instrumental role in bringing awareness of the need for a new statistical methodology. Résumé On attribue d'habitude à George Udny Yule, étudiant de Karl Pearson, la première rétrogradation multiple (Yule, 1899). Et, bien que ce travail monumental ait été bien documenté par les historiens de la statistique (par exemple, voir Desrosières, 1998; Stigler, 1986), les ambitions sociales, politiques et méthodologiques qui ont motivé le projet sont moins connues. Dans ce papier, nous localisons les premières tentatives d'innovation multivariée après Galton. Charles Stewart Loch, alors secrétaire pour la Société d'Organisation de Charité (C.O.S), a réagi à l'étude extensive de Charles Booth The Aged Poor in England and Wales et en a rejeté avec véhémence les conclusions. Nous montrons que Loch a contribué à la prise de conscience de la nécessité d’une nouvelle méthodologie statistique. 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel J. Denis (daniel.denis@umontana.edu), Department of Psychology, University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, Montana, , 59812, U.S.A.
Anger disorders: basic science and practice issues.

Anger plays a significant role in everyday life. Sometimes it is shortlived, moderate in intensity, and, perhaps, even helpful. At other times it is persistent, severe, and highly disruptive. Overt anger can lead to negative evaluations by others, a negative self-concept, low self-esteem, interpersonal and family conflict, verbal and physical assault, property destruction, and occupational maladjustment (Deffenbacher, 1992). Suppressed anger is related to a number of medical conditions including essential hypertension, coronary artery disease, and cancer (Greer & Morris, 1975; Harburg, Gleiberman, Russell, & Cooper, 199 1 ; Harburg, Blakelock, & Roeper, 1979; Kalis, Harris, Bennett, & Sokolow, 1961; Spielberger, Crane, Kearns, Pellegrin, & Rickman, 1991). These detrimental effects of anger have been known for a long time. More than 60 years ago, Meltzer (1933) reported that, “Anger has been called the worst propensity of human nature, the father and mother of craft, cruelty, and intrigue, and the chief enemy of public happiness and private peace” (p. 285). More recently, Dix ( 199 1 ) concluded that even the common experience of parenting is constantly associated with anger. He noted that, “. average parents report high levels of anger with their children, the need to engage in techniques to control their anger, and fear that they will at some time lose control and harm their children” (p. 3). Anger is also a frequent experience. According to Averill (1 983), “Depending upon how records are kept, most people report becoming mildly to moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week (Anastasi, Cohen, & Spatz, 1948; Averill, 1979, 1982; Gates, 1926; Meltzer, 1933; Richardson, 1918)” (p. 1146). His reference list spans 75 years, suggesting stability of the anger experience as well as the everyday frequency. Given these observations, it is no surprise that anger is a common reason that leads people to seek professional help.
Reproductive improvement and senescence in a long-lived bird

Heterogeneity within a population is a pervasive challenge for studies of individual life-histories. Population-level patterns in age-specific reproductive success can be broken down into relative contributions from selective disappearance, selective appearance of individuals into the study population, and average change in performance for survivors (average ontogenetic development). In this article, we provide an exact decomposition. We apply our formula to data on the reproductive performance of a well characterized population of common terns (Sterna hirundo). We show that improvements with age over most of adult life and senescence at old ages are primarily due to a genuine change in the mean among surviving individuals rather than selective disappearance or selective appearance of individuals. Average ontogenetic development accounts for approximately 87% of the overall age-specific population change.
Collaborative Energy Debugging for Mobile Devices

We aim to detect and diagnose code misbehavior that wastes energy, which we call energy bugs. This paper describes a method and implementation, called Carat, for performing such diagnosis on mobile devices. Carat takes a collaborative, black-box approach. A non-invasive client app sends intermittent, coarse-grained measurements to a server, which identifies correlations between higher expected energy use and client properties like the running apps, device model, and operating system. Carat successfully detected all energy bugs in a controlled experiment and, during a deployment to 883 users, identified 5434 instances of apps exhibiting buggy behavior in the wild.
Enhanced analgesic effects of tramadol and common trace element coadministration in mice

Chronic pain is managed mostly by the daily administration of analgesics. Tramadol is one of the most commonly used drugs, marketed in combination with coanalgesics for enhanced effect. Trace elements are frequent ingredients in dietary supplements and may enhance tramadol's analgesic effect either through synergic mechanisms or through analgesic effects of their own. Swiss Weber male mice were divided into nine groups and were treated with a combination of the trace elements Mg, Mn, and Zn in three different doses and a fixed dose of tramadol. Two groups served as positive (tramadol alone) and negative (saline) controls. Nociceptive assessment by tail‐flick (TF) and hot‐plate (HP) tests was performed at baseline and at 15, 30, 45, and 60 min after intraperitoneal administration. Response latencies were recorded and compared with the aid of ANOVA testing. All three trace elements enhanced tramadol's analgesic effect, as assessed by TF and HP test latencies. Coadministration of these trace elements led to an increase of approximately 30% in the average pain inhibition compared with the tramadol‐alone group. The most effective doses were 0.6 mg/kg b.w. for Zn, 75 mg/kg b.w. for Mg, and 7.2 mg/kg b.w. for Mn. Associating trace elements such as Zn, Mg, and Mn with the standard administration of tramadol increases the drug's analgesic effect, most likely a consequence of their synergic action. These findings impact current analgesic treatment because the addition of these trace elements may reduce the tramadol dose required to obtain analgesia. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
HitFraud: A Broad Learning Approach for Collective Fraud Detection in Heterogeneous Information Networks

On electronic game platforms, different payment transactions have different levels of risk. Risk is generally higher for digital goods in e-commerce. However, it differs based on product and its popularity, the offer type (packaged game, virtual currency to a game or subscription service), storefront and geography. Existing fraud policies and models make decisions independently for each transaction based on transaction attributes, payment velocities, user characteristics, and other relevant information. However, suspicious transactions may still evade detection and hence we propose a broad learning approach leveraging a graph based perspective to uncover relationships among suspicious transactions, i.e., inter-transaction dependency. Our focus is to detect suspicious transactions by capturing common fraudulent behaviors that would not be considered suspicious when being considered in isolation. In this paper, we present HitFraud that leverages heterogeneous information networks for collective fraud detection by exploring correlated and fast evolving fraudulent behaviors. First, a heterogeneous information network is designed to link entities of interest in the transaction database via different semantics. Then, graph based features are efficiently discovered from the network exploiting the concept of meta-paths, and decisions on frauds are made collectively on test instances. Experiments on real-world payment transaction data from Electronic Arts demonstrate that the prediction performance is effectively boosted by HitFraud with fast convergence.
Participative political institutions in pre-modern Europe: Introducing a new database

ABSTRACT This article introduces and describes a new city-level data set on political institutions in pre-modern Europe. To be precise, it presents three variables reporting the prevalence of the different existing types of participative political institutions between AD 800 and AD 1800 in 104 cities in central Europe (Alsace-Lorrain, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland). According to the historical studies consulted, the three included measures (intensity of guild participation in the city council, participative election procedures, and the existence of institutionalized burgher representation) represent the universe of existing political institutions in cities in this era. This new data set is potentially useful for advancing knowledge in various ongoing research debates about the impact of political institutions and regimes on city development, the effects of guilds, the relationship of economic and political institutions, the debate about the advantages or disadvantages of city states relative to territorial states, and so forth.
Characterization of the Mycobacterial Acyl-CoA Carboxylase Holo Complexes Reveals Their Functional Expansion into Amino Acid Catabolism

Biotin-mediated carboxylation of short-chain fatty acid coenzyme A esters is a key step in lipid biosynthesis that is carried out by multienzyme complexes to extend fatty acids by one methylene group. Pathogenic mycobacteria have an unusually high redundancy of carboxyltransferase genes and biotin carboxylase genes, creating multiple combinations of protein/protein complexes of unknown overall composition and functional readout. By combining pull-down assays with mass spectrometry, we identified nine binary protein/protein interactions and four validated holo acyl-coenzyme A carboxylase complexes. We investigated one of these - the AccD1-AccA1 complex from Mycobacterium tuberculosis with hitherto unknown physiological function. Using genetics, metabolomics and biochemistry we found that this complex is involved in branched amino-acid catabolism with methylcrotonyl coenzyme A as the substrate. We then determined its overall architecture by electron microscopy and found it to be a four-layered dodecameric arrangement that matches the overall dimensions of a distantly related methylcrotonyl coenzyme A holo complex. Our data argue in favor of distinct structural requirements for biotin-mediated γ-carboxylation of α−β unsaturated acid esters and will advance the categorization of acyl-coenzyme A carboxylase complexes. Knowledge about the underlying structural/functional relationships will be crucial to make the target category amenable for future biomedical applications.
A retrospective on database application development frameworks

Four application framework models developed by the author for database application development systems are described. The key feature of these systems is to provide a model for the definition of high level objects that represent interface abstraction that can be used to build an application. Structuring application code around interface objects reduces the conceptual distance between the executing program and its specification. At the same time, good programming practices must be supported (e.g., code modularity, reusable components, and information hiding).
Validation française de l’échelle multidimensionnelle satisfaction de vie chez l’élève (Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale)

Cette recherche presente la validation en francais de la Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS) de Huebner (1994) sur 853 eleves de troisieme et de terminale. Les consistances internes (coefficient alpha de Cronbach) sont toutes superieures a . 70. L'analyse exploratoire permet bien de retrouver les cinq contextes de l'echelle, et l'analyse confirmatoire permet de valider le modele en six facteurs avec cinq facteurs de premier ordre et un facteur de second ordre. Des analyses complementaires montrent que l'echelle correle bien avec d'autres mesures liees au bien-etre et a la depression. Les differents resultats montrent que la version francaise de la MSLSS offre une bonne validite et permet de facon adequate de mesurer le bien-etre scolaire des eleves dans les differents contextes de l'echelle. Enfin, il s'avere que l'echelle, et plus specifiquement sa dimension scolaire, est moderement predictive des resultats scolaires des eleves de troisieme mais pas de ceux de terminale.
Resampling Residuals on Phylogenetic Trees: Extended Results

In this article the results of Waddell and Azad (2009) are extended. In particular, the geometric percentage mean standard deviation measure of the fit of distances to a phylogenetic tree is adjusted for the number of parameters fitted to the model. The formulae are also presented in their general form for any weight that is a function of the distance. The cell line gene expression data set of Ross et al. (2000) is reanalyzed. It is shown that ordinary least squares (OLS) is a much better fit to the data than a Neighbor Joining or BME tree. Residual resampling shows that cancer cell lines do indeed fit a tree fairly well and that the tree does have strong internal structure. Simulations show that least squares tree building methods, including OLS, are strong competitors with BME type methods for fitting model data, while real world examples often suggest the same conclusion.
Violent Video Games Cause Aggression in Young Females

The question addressed in the current study is if playing violent video games might have an influence on the level of aggression of the gamer. Young female adults, mean age 22, with no prior experience of playing video games, were asked to fill in the Buss Perry Aggression Questionnaire before and after playing: violent video game “Last Stand” (Experimental Group) and non-violent video game “Tetris” (Control Group). Paired-samples t-test revealed significant difference in means on the physical aggression subscale in the experimental group before (M= 20, SD=6.0) and after playing the video game (M= 22, SD= 6.6), t (43)= -2.7, p= . 009, while no significant difference was found between the means of Buss Perry Aggression Questionnaire before and after playing non-violent video game in the Control Group. Playing violent video games is suggested to influence the emotional domain and to increase the physical aggression of the female participants, naïve to playing violent games.
Graph Partitioning Algorithms for Distributing Workloads of Parallel Computations

This paper surveys graph partitioning algorithms used for parallel computing, with an emphasis on the problem of distributing workloads for parallel computations. Geometric, structural, and refinementbased algorithms are described and contrasted. In addition, multilevel partitioning techniques and issues related to parallel partitioning are addressed. All algorithms are evaluated qualitatively in terms of their execution speed and ability to generate partitions with small separators.
Comparative study of surface modification of titanium to improve antimicrobial properties in condenser material

Biofouling of titanium is a common and established problem in aquatic environment which is used for various cooling purpose in industries. Conventional strategies to control biofouling like mechanical sponge ball scrubbing and chemical treatment like chlorination are rather ineffective in combating biofilm generation. Hence these calls for renewed efforts to establish novel methodologies for eliminating multicelluar bacterial communes entrained in these biofilms. Metal nanoparticles are known to exhibit enhanced physical and chemical properties when compared to their bulk counter parts because of their high surface to volume ratios. Copper (Cu) and copper alloys like copper-nickel (Cu-Ni) are well known to have excellent resistance to biofouling and hence are used extensively for marine applications. Therefore it is possible to modify the bacterial growth dynamics thereby reducing bacterial attachment to titanium surfaces.