Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Graph-Theoretical Approach for Motif Discovery in Protein Sequences

Motif recognition is a challenging problem in bioinformatics due to the diversity of protein motifs. Many existing algorithms identify motifs of a given length, thus being either not applicable or not efficient when searching simultaneously for motifs of various lengths. Searching for gapped motifs, although very important, is a highly time-consuming task due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations implied by the consideration of long gaps. We introduce a new graph theoretical approach to identify motifs of various lengths, both with and without gaps. We compare our approach with two widely used methods: MEME and GLAM2 analyzing both the quality of the results and the required computational time. Our method provides results of a slightly higher level of quality than MEME but at a much faster rate, i.e., one eighth of MEME's query time. By using similarity indexing, we drop the query times down to an average of approximately one sixth of the ones required by GLAM2, while achieving a slightly higher level of quality of the results. More precisely, for sequence collections smaller than 50,000 bytes GLAM2 is 13 times slower, while being at least as fast as our method on larger ones. The source code of our C++ implementation is freely available in GitHub: https://github.com/hirvolt1/debruijn-motif.
Sparsity-Aware Successive Interference Cancellation with Practical Constraints

This paper investigates new detection methods for low data-rate Machine Type Communication. Special attention is paid to uplink communication in networks where nodes are only active occasionally, which requires a joint activity and data detection at the receiver. This paper shows that a modified version of Successive Interference Cancellation is a viable approach for the detection of these low data-rate multi-user signals. The analysis is in the context of a hardware implementation, which we address particularly as we investigate the algorithmic complexity of the introduced algorithms.
A duration-based confidence measure for automatic segmentation of noise corrupted speech

In this study, a duration{based measure is formulated for assigning con(cid:12)dence scores to phonetic time{alignments produced by an automatic speech segmentation system. For speech corrupted by additive noise or telephone channel environments, the proposed con(cid:12)dence measure is shown to provide a reliable means by which gross segmentation errors can be automatically detected and marked for human hand correction. The measure is evaluated by computing Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to illustrate the expected trade{o(cid:11) in probability of detecting gross segmentation errors versus false alarm rates.
Confucianization through globalization: evidence from the US

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the non‐economic outcome of globalization, the penetration of Confucian philosophy into the Western workforce, as represented by the USA.Design/methodology/approach – With a survey method, a sample of 581 East Asians, American‐born Asian Americans, immigrant Asian Americans, and Caucasian Americans in the USA were included in the study. Statistical analysis was used to test three hypotheses.Findings – The findings revealed that Confucian philosophy has penetrated in the Western world. The presence of Confucian philosophy was identified, but varied by cultural background, gender, education, and work experience.Practical implications – The results revealed an important aspect of the non‐economic outcomes of globalization and may offer explanations for the effects of racio‐ethnic diversity on affective reactions, performance, and social processes within groups. The results may be used to inform organizational diversity management and training for a meaningful.
Mining Chinese-English Parallel Corpora from the Web

Parallel corpora are a crucial resource in research fields such as cross-lingual information retrieval and statistical machine translation, but only a few parallel corpora with high quality are publicly available nowadays. In this paper, we try to solve the problem by developing a system that can automatically mine high quality parallel corpora from the World Wide Web. The system contains a three-step process. The system uses a web spider to crawl certain hosts at first. Then candidate parallel web page pairs are prepared from the downloaded page set. At last, each candidate pair is examined based on multiple standards. We develop novel strategies for the implementation of the system, which are then proved to be rather effective by the experiments towards a multilingual website.
Low complexity approximate cyclic adaptive matching pursuit

Based on the iterated cyclic adaptive matching pursuit algorithm, we construct a low complexity approximate variant for finding sparse solutions to systems of linear equations. We employ a greedy neighbor permutation strategy coupled with an approximate scalar product matrix to ensure that the complexity of the algorithm remains low. The sparse solution is cyclically updated improving the performance while the sparsity level is estimated online using the predictive least squares criterion. The performance of the algorithm is similar to that of the non approximate variants while the complexity can be considerably lower.
Bacterial Indicator of Agricultural Management for Soil under No-Till Crop Production

The rise in the world demand for food poses a challenge to our ability to sustain soil fertility and sustainability. The increasing use of no-till agriculture, adopted in many areas of the world as an alternative to conventional farming, may contribute to reduce the erosion of soils and the increase in the soil carbon pool. However, the advantages of no-till agriculture are jeopardized when its use is linked to the expansion of crop monoculture. The aim of this study was to survey bacterial communities to find indicators of soil quality related to contrasting agriculture management in soils under no-till farming. Four sites in production agriculture, with different soil properties, situated across a west-east transect in the most productive region in the Argentinean pampas, were taken as the basis for replication. Working definitions of Good no-till Agricultural Practices (GAP) and Poor no-till Agricultural Practices (PAP) were adopted for two distinct scenarios in terms of crop rotation, fertilization, agrochemicals use and pest control. Non-cultivated soils nearby the agricultural sites were taken as additional control treatments. Tag-encoded pyrosequencing was used to deeply sample the 16S rRNA gene from bacteria residing in soils corresponding to the three treatments at the four locations. Although bacterial communities as a whole appeared to be structured chiefly by a marked biogeographic provincialism, the distribution of a few taxa was shaped as well by environmental conditions related to agricultural management practices. A statistically supported approach was used to define candidates for management-indicator organisms, subsequently validated using quantitative PCR. We suggest that the ratio between the normalized abundance of a selected group of bacteria within the GP1 group of the phylum Acidobacteria and the genus Rubellimicrobium of the Alphaproteobacteria may serve as a potential management-indicator to discriminate between sustainable vs. non-sustainable agricultural practices in the Pampa region.
The assessment of influence of personality type on metabolic control and compliance with physician’s instructions in type 2 diabetic patients

Background . Education of patients with diabetes is very important element of treatment associated with better metabolic control and prevention of chronic diabetic complications. Although all patients are educated with the same methods, there is variability in glycaemic control. Psychological factor may help to explain and predict clinical outcomes. The aim of the study was to determine whether type of personality is associated with glycaemic control and compliance with physician’s instructions in type 2 diabetic patients. Material and methods . 41 consecutive type 2 diabetes patients were enrolled (age: 57 ± 5.1 years, duration of diabetes: 8.58 ± 2.92 years). Antropometric parameters, HbA1c were assessed. All patients were asked to fill NEO-FFI (NEO-Five Factory Inventory), which is a question-inventory measuring 5 major domains of normal personality. Relationships between type of personality and measures of glycaemic control and BMI were evaluated by χ2 test. Results . Increased HbA1c values were associated with higher scores of neuroticism, lower scores of agreeablness and conscientiousness. Higher BMI was associated with higher scores of neuroticism and lower scores of conscientiousness. Conclusions . Type of personality, especially in domains like neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness, seems to influence on glycaemic control and compliance with physician’s instructions in patients with type 2 diabetes.
Some Problems of Transcultural Psychiatry

SOME PROBLEMS OF TRANSCULTURAL PSYCHIATRY E. D. WITTKOWER, M.D. Associate Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University J. FRIED, PH.D. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, McGill University ODERN psychiatry has arrived at a stage of theoretical sophistication M where the socio-cultural dimension joins with the genetic, biological, and psychological interpretation of human behaviour. Valuable contributions to the field of cultural psychiatry, i.e. that branch of psychiatry which deals with the interrelationship of abnormal psychological states and socio-cultural milieu, have been made in the past fifteen years. Epidemiological studies related to the ecology of city life,(s, 10, n, z4, ss) to social stratification, (16, 17) to occupation, (12, 18, 81) and to ethnic groupS(2,7, 20, 21, 25, 33. 38, 40, 41) have been carried out by psychiatrists and social scientists. Another important development has been the careful study of whole communities (such as the Hutterites(9) and the Stirling County [Nova Scotia] project, (22,23) the Yorkville study,(10) etc.) in which the factors of community social structure and culture were brought into direct relation with mental health. Still another avenue of research has been the study of the beneficial and harmful aspects of the hospital environment in the therapeutic process. (5, 6, 39) Most of this literature has been aptly surveyed in Arnold M. Rose, Mental Health and Mental Disorder,<34> and M. K. Opler, Culture Psychiatry and Human Values. (28)
Das Konfliktlösungsstil-Inventar für Paare (KSIP) Psychometrische Eigenschaften und Validierung der autorisierten deutschsprachigen Übersetzung

Zusammenfassung. Vorgestellt wird eine deutsche Ubersetzung des „Conflict Resolution Styles Inventory“ (CRSI, Kurdek, 1994). Der Fragebogen erfasst mit 32 Items vier Dimensionen von Konfliktlosungsstilen: Kampferischer Konfliktstil, Positive Konfliktlosung, Ruckzug und Nachgiebigkeit jeweils in der Selbst- und Partnerbeurteilung. Die faktorielle Struktur und die Messinvarianz fur Frauen und Manner sowie die Messaquivalenz zur amerikanischen Originalversion wurden mittels konfirmatorischer Faktoranalyse gepruft. Die Ergebnisse bestatigen die postulierte vierfaktorielle Struktur des Fragenbogens und deren Messinvarianz und Messaquivalenz. Die psychometrischen Eigenschaften der Skalen sind gut. Die konvergente und diskriminante Validitat wurde an den globalen Faktoren der Personlichkeit, der Partnerschaftszufriedenheit sowie der selbst- und fremdwahrgenommenen Belastung untersucht und belegt eine theoretisch fundierte Einbettung in das nomologische Netzwerk von Konfliktlosungsstilen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass mit der deutschsprachigen Ubersetzung des CRSI eine reliable, okonomische und valide Erfassung von Konfliktlosungsstilen in der Selbst- und Partnerbeurteilung geleistet werden kann. Schlusselworter: Konfliktlosungsstil-Inventar fur Paare (KSIP), Paardiagnostik, Konfliktlosungsstile, CFA, Testgutekriterien The German Version of the Conflict Resolution Styles Inventory (CRSI) – psychometric properties and validation of the authorized German version
The Pros and Cons of Computer-Aided Surgery for Segmental Mandibular Reconstruction after Oncological Surgery

Computer-aided surgery (CAS) started being used for head and neck reconstruction in the late 2000s. Its use represented a paradigm shift, changing the concept of head and neck reconstruction as well as mandible reconstruction. Reconstruction using CAS proceeds through 4 phases: planning, modeling, surgery, and evaluation. Thus, it can overcome a number of trial-and-error issues which may occur in the operative field and reduce surgical time. However, if it is used for oncologic surgery, it is difficult to evaluate tumor margins during tumor surgery, thereby restricting pre-surgical planning. Therefore, it is dangerous to predetermine the resection margins during the pre-surgical phase and the variability of the resection margins must be taken into consideration. However, it allows for the preparation of a prebending plate and planning of an osteotomy site before an operation, which are of great help. If the current problems are resolved, its applications can be greatly extended.
Psychology, Society and Subjectivity: An Introduction to German Critical Psychology

Part I Dissent: 1. Ideology, Power and Subjectivity. Part II Critique: 2. Philosophical assumptions 3. Social-historical Theory 4. Specific Psychological Theories. Part III Reconstruction 5. Reconstructing the Psychological Categories 6. From Phylogenesis to the Dominance of Sociogenesis 7. Individual Subjectivity and its Development. Part IV Toward Practice: 8. Methodological Implications.
Design of Anion Exchange Membranes and Electrodialysis Studies for Water Desalination

Anion exchange membranes are highly versatile and nowadays have many applications, ranging from water treatment to sensing materials. The preparation of anion exchange membranes (AEMs) from brominated poly(2,6-dimethyl-1,6-phenylene oxide) (BPPO) and methyl(diphenyl)phosphine (MDPP) for electrodialysis was performed. The physiochemical properties and electrochemical performance of fabricated membranes can be measured by changing MDPP contents in the membrane matrix. The influence of a quaternary phosphonium group associated with the removal of NaCl from water is discussed. The prepared membranes have ion exchange capacities (IEC) 1.09–1.52 mmol/g, water uptake (WR) 17.14%–21.77%, linear expansion ratio (LER) 7.96%–11.86%, tensile strength (TS) 16.66–23.97 MPa and elongation at break (Eb) 485.57%–647.98%. The prepared anion exchange membranes were employed for the electrodialytic removal of 0.1 M NaCl aqueous solution at a constant applied voltage. It is found that the reported membranes could be the promising candidate for NaCl removal via electrodialysis.
Nanoporous device for accurate dose control in high throughput screening

This paper reports a new microfluidic high throughput screening(HTS) device targeted for cell based assays. The device consists of a nanoporous membrane, imprinted with poly-dimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to block all pores except in selected areas (microspots) arranged in an array. This membrane is sandwiched between a gel layer above, for cell culture, and a microfiuidic network below, which provides fluidic access to the gel region above the microspots. The nanoporous membrane reduces diffusion significantly while allowing electrophoretic motion. Electrophoretic pumping of model drug candidates into the gel from the microchannels underneath in a controlled manner was demonstrated. Drug spots of 200 mum to 6 mm in diameter on 3 mm thick gel layer were created. Dosing accuracy of 50 mug was achieved.
Astaxanthin improves glucose metabolism and reduces blood pressure in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This randomized, placebo-controlled trial was performed for 8 weeks to investigate the potential effects of astaxanthin (AST) supplementation on the adiponectin concentration, lipid peroxidation, glycemic control, insulin sensitivity, and anthropometric indices in participants with type 2 diabetes mellitus. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN We enrolled 44 participants with type 2 diabetes who met our inclusion criteria. Eight milligrams of AST supplementation or a placebo were randomly administered once daily for 8 weeks to these participants. RESULTS The 8-week administration of AST supplementation increased the serum adiponectin concentration and reduced visceral body fat mass (p<0.01), serum triglyceride and very-low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations, and systolic blood pressure (p<0.05). Furthermore, AST significantly reduced the fructosamine concentration (p<0.05) and marginally reduced the plasma glucose concentration (p=0.057). CONCLUSIONS We demonstrated that because participants with type 2 diabetes often have hypertriglycemia and uncontrolled glucose metabolism; our findings of dual beneficial effects are clinically valuable. Our results may provide a novel complementary treatment with potential impacts on diabetic complications without adverse effects.
Development of Microfluidic Chips for Impedance Studies of Tumor Cells

The development and research of antitumor drugs requires the creation of new solutions for personalized medicine, in particular, integrated devices for testing the effectiveness of drugs based on microfluidic systems. Such systems allow rapid assessment of small volumes of samples of both cells and supracellular structures, including those taken from real patients. In this work, such a system is implemented on the basis of polymer materials using laser ablation and thermal bonding technologies with integrated electrodes. With their help, an impedance study of rat glioma samples was carried out. The frequency dependences of the impedance modulus were obtained, and equivalent circuits were constructed for the reduced sample capacity as a marker parameter of the effect of the drug on the sample. The developed system can be used in clinical diagnostic practice in a hospital setting.
Protein-bound phosphorylserine in acid hydrolysates of brain tissue. The determination of ( 32 P)phosphorylserine by ion-exchange chromatography and electrophoresis.

1. Partial acid hydrolysates of proteins derived from cortical slices of guinea-pig brain were divided into two parts and fractionated by ion-exchange chromatography and high-voltage electrophoresis. 2. The apparent yield of protein-bound phosphorylserine by the ion-exchange method was about three times that obtained by electrophoresis. 3. The specific radioactivity of phosphorylserine isolated from (32)P-labelled slices by electrophoresis was twice that isolated by chromatography. 4. The discrepancies were found to be due to the presence of unlabelled phosphates of unknown composition in the ;phosphorylserine' fraction obtained by the ion-exchange method. 5. Electrical stimulation of slices respiring in the presence of [(32)P]phosphate increased the specific radioactivity of the total phosphate in the chromatographic ;phosphorylserine' fraction by 53+/-11%, as compared with only 19+/-5% for the phosphorylserine isolated by electrophoresis.
PRAM-on-chip: first commitment to silicon

Introduction The eXplicit Multi-Threading (XMT) on-chip general-purpose computer architecture is aimed at the classic goal of reducing single task completion time. It is a parallel algorithmic architecture in the sense that: (i) it seeks to provide good performance for parallel programs derived from Parallel Random Access Machine/Model (PRAM) algorithms, and (ii) a methodology for advancing from PRAM algorithms to XMT programs, along with a performance metric and its empirical validation are provided [1]. Ease of parallel programming is now widely recognized as the main stumbling block for extending commodity computer performance growth (e.g., using multicores). XMT provides a unique answer to this challenge. This brief announcement (BA) reports first commitment to silicon of XMT. A 64-processor, 75MHz computer based on fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) technology was built at the University of Maryland (UMD). XMT was introduced in SPAA’98. An architecture simulator and speed-up results on several kernels were reported in SPAA’01. The new computer is a significant milestone for the broad PRAM-On-Chip project at UMD. In fact, contributions in the current BA include several stages since SPAA’01: completion of the design using a hardware description language (HDL), synthesis into gate level “netlist”, as well as validation of the design in real hardware. This overall progress, its context and uses of the much faster hardware over a simulator are the focus of this BA. The PRAM virtual model of computation assumes that any number of concurrent accesses to a shared memory take the same time as a single access. In the Arbitrary Concurrent-Read Concurrent-Write (CRCW) PRAM concurrent access to the same memory location for reads or writes are allowed. Reads are resolved before writes and an arbitrary write unknown in advance succeeds. Design of an efficient parallel algorithm for the Arbitrary CRCW PRAM model would seek to optimize the total number of operations the algorithms performs (“work”) and its parallel time (“depth”) assuming unlimited hardware. Given such an algorithm, an XMT program is written in XMTC, which is a modest single-program multiple-data (SPMD) multi-threaded extension of C that includes 3 commands: Spawn, Join and PS, for Prefix-Sum—a Fetch-and-Increment-like command. The program seeks to optimize: (i) the length of the (longest) sequence of round trips to memory (LSRTM), (ii) queuing delay to the
Automatic Fall Monitoring: A Review

Falls and fall-related injuries are major incidents, especially for elderly people, which often mark the onset of major deterioration of health. More than one-third of home-dwelling people aged 65 or above and two-thirds of those in residential care fall once or more each year. Reliable fall detection, as well as prevention, is an important research topic for monitoring elderly living alone in residential or hospital units. The aim of this study is to review the existing fall detection systems and some of the key research challenges faced by the research community in this field. We categorize the existing platforms into two groups: wearable and ambient devices; the classification methods are divided into rule-based and machine learning techniques. The relative merit and potential drawbacks are discussed, and we also outline some of the outstanding research challenges that emerging new platforms need to address.
FunFrame: functional gene ecological analysis pipeline

SUMMARY Pyrosequencing of 16S rDNA is widely used to study microbial communities, and a rich set of software tools support this analysis. Pyrosequencing of protein-coding genes, which can help elucidate functional differences among microbial communities, significantly lags behind 16S rDNA in availability of sequence analysis software. In both settings, frequent homopolymer read errors inflate the estimation of microbial diversity, and de-noising is required to reduce that bias. Here we describe FunFrame, an R-based data-analysis pipeline that uses recently described algorithms to de-noise functional gene pyrosequences and performs ecological analysis on de-noised sequence data. The novelty of this pipeline is that it provides users a unified set of tools, adapted from disparate sources and designed for different applications, that can be used to examine a particular protein coding gene of interest. We evaluated FunFrame on functional genes from four PCR-amplified clones with sequence depths ranging from 9084 to 14 494 sequences. FunFrame produced from one to nine Operational Taxanomic Units for each clone, resulting in an error rate ranging from 0 to 0.18%. Importantly, FunFrame reduced spurious diversity while retaining more sequences than a commonly used de-noising method that discards sequences with frameshift errors. AVAILABILITY Software, documentation and a complete set of sample data files are available at http://faculty.www. umb.edu/jennifer.bowen/software/FunFrame.zip.