Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Expression of lacZ from the Promoter of theEscherichia coli spc Operon Cloned into Vectors Carrying the W205 trp-lac Fusion

ABSTRACT The expression of lacZ has been analyzed and compared in a series of promoter cloning vectors by measuring the amount oflacZ mRNA by hybridization and the amount of β-galactosidase by standard enzymatic assay. Expression was driven by the promoter, Pspc, of the spcribosomal protein operon. The vectors contained either the standard W205 trp-lac fusion with the trp operon transcription terminator, trpt, located in thelacZ leader sequence, or a deletion derivative that functionally inactivates trpt. In the presence oftrpt, lacZ expression was temperature dependent so that increasing the growth temperature reduced the accumulation oflacZ mRNA and β-galactosidase activity. The frequency of transcript termination at trpt was estimated to be near zero at 20°C and at about 45% at 37°C. The amount of Pspc-derived lacZ mRNA and the amount of β-galactosidase produced per lacZ mRNA varied, depending on the mRNA 5′ leader sequence between Pspc and lacZ. These results demonstrate that the quantitative assessment of promoter activities with promoter cloning vectors requires careful analysis and interpretation. One particular construct without trpt did not seem to contain fortuitous transcription or translation signals generated at the fusion junction. In this strain, lacZexpression from Pspc was compared at the enzyme activity and mRNA levels with a previously constructed strain in whichlacZ was linked to the tandem P1 and P2 promoters of therrnB operon. At any given growth rate, the different activities of β-galactosidase in these two strains were found to reflect the same differences in their amounts of lacZ mRNA. Assuming that the promoter-lacZ fusions in these strains reflect the properties of the promoters in their normal chromosomal setting, it was possible to estimate the absolute transcription activity of Pspc and the relative translation efficiency of Pspc-lacZ mRNA at different growth rates. Transcription from the spc promoter was found to increase from about 10 transcripts per min at a growth rate of 1.0 doublings/h to a maximum plateau of about 23 transcripts per min at growth rates above 1.5 doublings/h. The translation frequency of lacZ mRNA expressed from Pspc was unaffected by growth rates.
A computational cognitive model for political positioning and reactions in web media

This paper presents a computational cognitive model about political positioning inspired on recent insights from neuroscience and psychology. We describe a model that takes into consideration the individual structures of the brain and the environmental influences that may interfere on how a political positioning is shaped in a social media environment. Results also consider the social contagion effect. We use the model to provide simulations of how the political positioning of artificial agents change under different circumstances.
Transfection of HEK Cells via DNA-loaded PLGA and P(FASA) Nanospheres

HEK cells were transfected with the GFP gene using various vectors: naked DNA, lipofectamine, and both PLGA and P(FASA) plasmid-loaded nanospheres. All methods were assessed alone and with the use of chloroquine, a lysosomal enzyme inhibitor. Transfection efficiencies were determined and compared at various times post-incubation using a fluorescence standard curve. Neither naked DNA alone nor naked DNA and chloroquine were capable of transfecting cells. No differences were evident between lipofectamine with chloroquine and lipofectamine alone which transfected cells with a constant increase in efficiency up to 2 weeks. While transfection was not feasible with polymeric nanospheres alone, the addition of chloroquine allowed DNA released from nanospheres within cells to escape endosomal degradation and transfect the cells. The increase in transfection efficiency via nanospheres over time was exponential up to 1 week, as compared to the constant rate seen for the bolus-type administration of lipofectamine, indicating that nanospheres delivered DNA to the cells by a controlled release mechanism. Additionally, the effective dose delivered to cells via nanospheres was approximately 25% that of lipofectamine, indicating that transfection via PLGA and P(FASA) nanospheres might actually be more efficient.
Designer disordered complex media : hyperuniform photonic and phononic band gap materials.

In this thesis we investigate designer disordered complex media for photonics and phononics applications. Initially we focus on the photonic properties and we analyse hyperuniform disordered structures (HUDS) using numerical simulations. Photonic HUDS are a new class of photonic solids, which display large, isotropic photonic band gaps (PBG) comparable in size to the ones found in photonic crystals (PC). We review their complex interference properties, including the origin of PBGs and potential applications. HUDS combine advantages of both isotropy due to disorder (absence of long-range order) and controlled scattering properties from uniform local topology due to hyperuniformity (constrained disorder). The existence of large band gaps in HUDS contradicts the long-standing intuition that Bragg scattering and long-range translational order is required in PBG formation, and demonstrates that interactions between Mie-like local resonances and multiple scattering can induce on their own PBGs. The discussion is extended to finite height effects of planar architectures such as pseudo-band-gaps in photonic slabs as well as the vertical confinement in the presence of disorder. The particular case of a silicon-on-insulator compatible hyperuniform disordered network structure is considered for TE polarised light. We address technologically realisable designs of HUDS including localisation of light in point-defect-like optical cavities and the guiding of light in free-form PC waveguide analogues. Using finite-difference time domain and band structure computer simulations, we show that it is possible to construct optical cavities in planar hyperuniform disordered solids with isotropic band gaps that efficiently confine TE polarised radiation. We thus demonstrate that HUDS are a promising general-purpose design platform for integrated optical micro-circuitry. After analysing HUDS for photonic applications we investigate them in the context of elastic waves towards phononics applications. We demonstrate the first phononic band gaps (PnBG) for HUDS. We find that PnBGs in phononic HUDS can confine and guide elastic waves similar to photonic HUDS for EM radiation.
Reinforcement learning of humanoid rhythmic walking parameters based on visual information

This paper presents a method for learning the parameters of rhythmic walking to generate purposive humanoid motions. The controller consists of the two layers: rhythmic walking is realized by the lower layer, which adjusts the speed of the phase on the desired trajectory depending on sensory information, and the upper layer learns (i) the feasible parameter sets that enable stable walking, (ii) the causal relationship between the walking parameters to be given to the lower-layer controller and the change in the sensory information and (iii) the feasible rhythmic walking parameters by reinforcement learning so that a robot can reach the goal based on visual information. The experimental results show that a real humanoid learns to reach the ball and to shoot it into the goal in the context of the RoboCup soccer competition, and the further issues are discussed.
Grasping control based on time-to-contact method for a robot hand equipped with proximity sensors on fingertips

Quick motion and soft touch control are important for autonomous grasping. To perform a grasping action, a hand must adjust its fingertips to match the object shape. It is also necessary to reduce the fingertip velocity on contact with the object. We propose a method of fingertip velocity control for fast approach and slow contact using proximity sensors installed on fingertips. The proposed control reduces the fingertip velocity at contact, decreasing the change of impulse force and thus making it appropriate for grasping soft or fragile objects. The proposed control uses time-to-contact (TTC), which is converted from sensor output. It is known that many animals, including humans, use TTC for collision avoidance. TTC represents the remaining time until collision considering the rate change of a control variable. We carried out grasping tests on various common objects using TTC. Experimental results show that the proposed control realizes fingertip alignment perpendicular to unknown shapes and surface objects and lowers the velocity at contact.
Novel view synthesis from two cartoon face drawings

We propose a framework for novel view synthesis for a cartoon face given two images of key views such as front and side views. Due to the structure inconsistency of cartoon faces in manually drawn images, matching region detection between different views is a challenging task. We propose a local complexity based segmentation that grabs facial components such as eyes, eyebrows and mouth that are not clearly separated by contour in cartoon faces. We automatically find the matching region in the two input key images and morph them to create intermediate views.
Precoder Optimization for Nonlinear MIMO Transceiver Based on Arbitrary Cost Function

Assuming full channel state information (CSI) at both transmitter (CSIT) and receiver (CSIR), we consider optimizing a nonlinear MIMO transceiver with decision feedback equalizer (DFE) with respect to some global cost function f0. Setting the receiver to be a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) DFE, the MIMO transceiver optimization problem reduces to optimizing a linear precoder. Based on the generalized triangular decomposition (GTD) and majorization theory, we prove that for any cost function f0 the optimum precoder is of the same special structure and hence the original complicated matrix optimization problem can be significantly simplified to an optimization problem with scalar-valued variables. Furthermore, if the cost function is specialized to the cases where the composite function f0 o exp is either Schur-convex or Schur-concave, then the nonlinear transceiver design becomes exceedingly simple. In particular, when f0 o oexp is Schur-convex, the optimum nonlinear transceiver design turns out to be the uniform channel decomposition (UCD) scheme; when f0 o exp is Schur-concave, the optimum nonlinear design degenerates to linear diagonal transmission.
Generic Unpacking of Self-modifying, Aggressive, Packed Binary Programs

Nowadays most of the malware applications are either packed or protected. This techniques are applied especially to evade signature based detectors and also to complicate the job of reverse engineers or security analysts. The time one must spend on unpacking or decrypting malware layers is often very long and in fact remains the most complicated task in the overall process of malware analysis. In this report author proposes MmmBop as a relatively new concept of using dynamic binary instrumentation techniques for unpacking and bypassing detection by self-modifying and highly aggressive packed binary code. MmmBop is able to deal with most of the known and unknown packing algorithms and it is also suitable to successfully bypass most of currently used anti-reversing tricks. This framework does not depend on any other 3rd party software and it is developed entirely in user mode (ring3). MmmBop supports the IA-32 architecture and it is targeted for Microsoft Windows XP, some of the further deliberations will be referring directly to this operating system.
Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale for screening in the public health system.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the utilization of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale as a screening tool in the public health system. METHODS The Scale was administered between the 40th and 90th day after delivery to 245 mothers whose delivery occurred at a private maternity hospital located in the municipality of Belo Horizonte, Southeastern Brazil, from 2005 to 2006. All participants were submitted to a structured psychiatric interview (Mini-Plus 5.0), used as gold standard for postpartum depression diagnosis. The scale's sensitivity and specificity were calculated, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to find the best cut-off point. Student's t test was employed to compare numeric variables and chi-square was used for the categorical variables. Reliability was calculated by Cronbach's coefficient á of internal consistency. RESULTS Postpartum depression was diagnosed in 66 women (26.9% of the total sample). No differences were found between women with and without postpartum depression concerning age, level of schooling, number of prior deliveries, and marital status. Using 10 as the cut-off point, the scale's sensibility was 86.4, the specificity was 91.1, and the positive predictive value, 0.78. CONCLUSIONS The psychometric properties of the Scale characterize it as a good screening tool for postpartum depression and its disseminated use in Sistema Unico de Saúde (SUS - National Health System) could have positive impacts, with a significant increase in the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of postpartum depression.
The Downward Refinement Property

Using abstraction in planning does not guarantee an improvement in search efficiency; it is possible for an abstract planner to display worse performance than one that does not use abstraction. Analysis and experiments have shown that good abstraction hierarchies have, or are close to having, the downward refinement property, whereby, given that a concrete-level solution exists, every abstract solution can be refined to a concrete-level solution without backtracking across abstract levels. Working within a semantics for ABSTRIPS-style abstraction we provide a characterization of the downward refinement property. After discussing its effect on search efficiency, we develop a semantic condition sufficient for guaranteeing its presence in an abstraction hierarchy. Using the semantic condition, we then provide a set of sufficient and polynomial-time checkable syntactic conditions that can be used for checking a hierarchy for the downward refinement property.
Health care utilisation of women who experience pregnancy-related reflux, nausea and/or vomiting

Abstract Objective: Nausea, vomiting and reflux are common conditions experienced by women during pregnancy. The objective of this project was to examine women’s use of health services for these conditions. Methods: The study sample was obtained via the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. A total of 2445 women who were pregnant or who had recently given birth in 2009 were invited to complete a sub-survey in 2010 about pregnancy and health service utilisation. A response rate of 79.2% was obtained. Results: During their pregnancy, 604 (32.9%) respondents experienced nausea, with 255 (42.2%) of these women seeking help from a health care practitioner. A total of 201 women (11%) reported repeated vomiting, and 637 women (34.7%) reported reflux, of which 78.6% and 59.2% sought help, respectively. There were no significant differences in the mental and physical health measures between women with nausea, vomiting and/or reflux who sought help and women who did not. Having private health insurance with obstetric cover was associated with seeking help for reflux; this was the only demographic measure significantly associated with seeking help for any condition. Conclusion: Research is required to understand why many women do not seek professional help for common gastrointestinal conditions during pregnancy.
A Descend-Based Evolutionary Approach to Enhance Position Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have wide applicability to many important applications including environmental monitoring and military applications. Typically with the absolute positions of only a small portion of sensors predetermined, localization works for the precise estimation of the remaining sensor positions on which most location sensitive applications rely. Intrinsically, localization can be formulated as an unconstrained optimization problem based on various distance/path measures, for which most of the existing work focus on increasing its precision through different heuristic or mathematical techniques. In this paper, we propose to adapt an evolutionary approach, namely a micro-genetic algorithm (MGA), and its variant as postoptimizers to enhance the precision of existing localization methods including the Ad-hoc Positioning System. Our adapted MGA and its variants can easily be integrated into different localization methods. Besides, the prototypes of our evolutionary approach gained remarkable results on both uniform and anisotropic topologies of the simulation tests, thus prompting for many interesting directions for future investigation
Knowledge Management (KM) in automobile: Application of a value chain (VC) approach using KM tools

Knowledge Management (KM) has undoubtedly made strong inroads in the automobile industry. However, for KM to be effectively leveraged and permeate across an organization's value chain, a KM based approach is crucial. Hence, a conceptual framework with a KM based injection across the value chain espoused in this paper is crucial for sustaining and projecting competitive advantage and consequently growth much needed in the automobile sector today. Relationships between internal and external stakeholders have changed with the availability of the internet. Automobile manufacturers must now look inwards by paying emphasis on its value chain as an opportunity to be exploited. The framework outlined in this paper was formulated through case discussions with leading local automobile manufacturers. It also examines the use of KM systems/tools, utility of knowledge tools and opportunities to fuse KM across ones value chain with the interest of adding value to customers and stakeholders alike.
Face alignment using local hough voting

We present a novel Hough voting-based method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fiducial points localization, which can be conveniently integrated with any global prior model for final face alignment. Specifically, two or more stable facial components (e.g., eyes) are first localized and fixed as anchor points, based on which a separate local voting map is constructed for each fiducial point using kernel density estimation. The voting map allows us to effectively constrain the search region of fiducial points by exploiting the local spatial constraints imposed by it. In addition, a multioutput ridge regression method is adopted to align the voting map and the response map of local detectors to the ground truth map, and the learned transformations are then exploited to further increases the robustness of the algorithm against various appearance variations. Encouraging experimental results are given on several publicly available face databases.
Extending Grids with cloud resource management for scientific computing

From its start using supercomputers, scientific computing constantly evolved to the next levels such as cluster computing, meta-computing, or computational Grids. Today, Cloud Computing is emerging as the paradigm for the next generation of large-scale scientific computing, eliminating the need of hosting expensive computing hardware. Scientists still have their Grid environments in place and can benefit from extending them by leased Cloud resources whenever needed. This paradigm shift opens new problems that need to be analyzed, such as integration of this new resource class into existing environments, applications on the resources and security. The virtualization overheads for deployment and starting of a virtual machine image are new factors which will need to be considered when choosing scheduling mechanisms. In this paper we investigate the usability of compute Clouds to extend a Grid workflow middleware and show on a real implementation that this can speed up executions of scientific workflows.
Estimating Topographic Blocking Using a Froude Number When the Static Stability Is Nonuniform

Abstract A parameter widely used to predict topographic flow blocking is the nondimensional mountain height or, synonymously, the inverse Froude number. Predictions using this parameter are based on the morphology of flows with uniform upstream static stability and wind speed, which rarely occur in the real world. The appropriateness of applying this theory in the presence of nontrivial background stability is therefore investigated using a numerical model. Two methods were considered to estimate the low-level stability, averaging the Brunt–Vaisala frequency below the crest and using the bulk change in θ between the ground and crest level. No single best method emerged for estimating the upstream static stability and thereby mapping the simulations with inversions onto the set of solutions with constant stratification. Instead, the best method depended on the application at hand. To predict the onset of flow stagnation, averaging the low-level stability worked best, while to predict low-level flow diversi.
Verifying Linearizability via Optimized Refinement Checking

Linearizability is an important correctness criterion for implementations of concurrent objects. Automatic checking of linearizability is challenging because it requires checking that: (1) All executions of concurrent operations are serializable, and (2) the serialized executions are correct with respect to the sequential semantics. In this work, we describe a method to automatically check linearizability based on refinement relations from abstract specifications to concrete implementations. The method does not require that linearization points in the implementations be given, which is often difficult or impossible. However, the method takes advantage of linearization points if they are given. The method is based on refinement checking of finite-state systems specified as concurrent processes with shared variables. To tackle state space explosion, we develop and apply symmetry reduction, dynamic partial order reduction, and a combination of both for refinement checking. We have built the method into the PAT model checker, and used PAT to automatically check a variety of implementations of concurrent objects, including the first algorithm for scalable nonzero indicators. Our system is able to find all known and injected bugs in these implementations.