Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SEP protons in GEO measured with the ESA MultiFunctional spectrometer

The MFS (Multi-Functional Spectrometer) is a radiation monitor that together with CTTB (Component Technology Test Bed) make the AEEF-TDP8 (ESA Alphasat Environment and Effects Facility — Technology Demonstration Payload 8). The two units are hosted in the X panel of the Alphasat satellite in orbit since July 2013. MFS is an instrument specifically designed to characterise the Space Radiation environment while CTTB was built to monitor the effect of radiation on electrical components (GaN transistors, Memories and Optical Transceivers) in geostationary orbit. The mission lifetime of AEEF/TDP8 will be at least of three years and TDP8 is expected to be acquiring scientific data during the whole period. On ground, correlation between radiation environment and radiation effects can be established. Before launch, MFS was submitted to proton and electron beam tests at Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland in 2010. The main purpose was the validation and calibration of the MFS proto-flight model together with the estimation of particle energy resolution and identification capability. A full Geant4 simulation with CAD (Computer-aided design) geometry exported to GDML (Geometry Description Markup Language) description the MFS in-flight configuration was built. Ground tests results were validated with Geant4 simulation. The measurements of MFS proton channels and MFS proton response functions are evaluated using comparisons with INTEGRAL/IREM data during the Solar Proton Event (SPE) of January 2014. In addition, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) unfolding method was developed in order to unfold MFS data. Comparisons show that the derived ANN Alphasat/MFS fluxes are in remarkable agreement with INTEGRAL/IREM proton fluxes.
Crystal structure of the apo form of D‐alanine: D‐alanine ligase (Ddl) from Thermus caldophilus: A basis for the substrate‐induced conformational changes

Introduction. D-alanine:D-alanine ligase (Ddl) catalyses the dimerization of D-alanine before its incorporation in peptidoglycan precursors. The synthesis of D-alanine:Dalanine begins with an attack on the first D-alanine by the -phosphate of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to yield an acylphosphate. That is followed by attack by the amino group of the second D-alanine, which eliminates the phosphate and produces the D-alanine: D-alanine dipeptide. Peptidoglycan biosynthesis has long been an attractive target for antibacterial drugs, such as D-cycloserine, glycopeptide antibiotics (vancomycin and teicoplanins), and -lactams (penicillin and cephalosporins). Vancomycintype antibiotics, for example, bind directly to the D-alanine: D-alanine terminus, thereby inhibiting crosslinking by the transpeptidase. Notably, bacteria that show vancomycin resistance, which develops after prolonged clinical treatment with vancomycin, possess an inactive Ddl and rely on another ligase, D-alanine:D-lactate ligase (Van), which produces D-alanine:D-lactate rather than D-alanine:Dalanine for cell wall synthesis. The switch from D-alanine: D-alanine peptidoglycan termini to D-alanine:D-lactate results in the loss of crucial hydrogen bonding interactions that causes a 1000-fold reduction in vancomycin binding affinity. X-ray crystallographic studies of Ddl and Van have contributed significantly to our understanding of the ligand specificity these two enzymes and suggest that a His residue in Van plays a critical role. A positive charge on the side chain imidazole nitrogen of His would attract the negatively charged lactate to the second substrate binding site at pH values less than 7, but at higher pH values Van would predominantly synthesize D-alanine:D-alanine. In Ddl, a Tyr residue [Tyr216 in Escherichia coli (Eco) DdlB, Tyr232 in Thermus caldophilus (Tca) Ddl] occupies the same spatial position as the His residue, and the hydroxyl group of the Tyr interacts with the COOH-terminal of the second D-alanine substrate. The structure of Eco DdlB complexed with ADP/ phosphorylated phosphinate (PDB ID: 2DLN) or with ADP/phosphorylated phosphonate (PDB ID: 1IOV) has been determined, as have the structures of Leuconostoc mesenteroides (Lme) D-Alanine:D-Lactate ligase complexed with ADP and phosphinophosphate (PDB ID:1EHI) and Enterococcus faecium (Efa) VanA complexed with ADP and phosphinophosphate (PDB ID:1E4E). However, to analyze the reaction mechanisms of these enzymes and their associated conformational changes, it is necessary to know the structures of both the substrate-bound and substrate-free forms of these enzymes. Our aim in the present study, therefore, was to grow crystals of Ddl that diffracted to high resolution in the absence of substrates. Here we report the X-ray structure of TcaDdl resolved to a resolution of 1.9 A and describe the conformational differences of the apo structure, comparing it with the structures of the previously described transition state analogue complex.
To Board or Not to Board: Evidence from Nutrition, Health and Education Outcomes of Students in Rural China

The debate over whether boarding school is beneficial for students still exists in both developing and developed countries. In rural China, as a result of a national school merger program that began in 2001, the number of boarding students has increased dramatically. Little research has been done, however, to measure how boarding status may be correlated with nutrition, health and educational outcomes. In this paper, we compare the outcomes of boarding to those of non-boarding students using a large, aggregate dataset that includes 59 rural counties across five provinces in China. We find that for all outcomes boarding students perform worse than non-boarding students. Despite these differences, the absolute levels of all outcomes are low for both boarding and non-boarding students, indicating a need for new policies that will target all rural students regardless of their boarding status.
Transcriptomic Identification of Iron-Regulated and Iron-Independent Gene Copies within the Heavily Duplicated Trichomonas vaginalis Genome

Gene duplication is an important evolutionary mechanism and no eukaryote has more duplicated gene families than the parasitic protist Trichomonas vaginalis. Iron is an essential nutrient for Trichomonas and plays a pivotal role in the establishment of infection, proliferation, and virulence. To gain insight into the role of iron in T. vaginalis gene expression and genome evolution, we screened iron-regulated genes using an oligonucleotide microarray for T. vaginalis and by comparative EST (expressed sequence tag) sequencing of cDNA libraries derived from trichomonads cultivated under iron-rich (+Fe) and iron-restricted (−Fe) conditions. Among 19,000 ESTs from both libraries, we identified 336 iron-regulated genes, of which 165 were upregulated under +Fe conditions and 171 under −Fe conditions. The microarray analysis revealed that 195 of 4,950 unique genes were differentially expressed. Of these, 117 genes were upregulated under +Fe conditions and 78 were upregulated under −Fe conditions. The results of both methods were congruent concerning the regulatory trends and the representation of gene categories. Under +Fe conditions, the expression of proteins involved in carbohydrate metabolism, particularly in the energy metabolism of hydrogenosomes, and in methionine catabolism was increased. The iron–sulfur cluster assembly machinery and certain cysteine proteases are of particular importance among the proteins upregulated under −Fe conditions. A unique feature of the T. vaginalis genome is the retention during evolution of multiple paralogous copies for a majority of all genes. Although the origins and reasons for this gene expansion remain unclear, the retention of multiple gene copies could provide an opportunity to evolve differential expression during growth in variable environmental conditions. For genes whose expression was affected by iron, we found that iron influenced the expression of only some of the paralogous copies, whereas the expression of the other paralogs was iron independent. This finding indicates a very stringent regulation of the differentially expressed paralogous genes in response to changes in the availability of exogenous nutrients and provides insight into the evolutionary rationale underlying massive paralog retention in the Trichomonas genome.
Dependence of auditory cortex evoked unit activity on interstimulus interval in the cat.

1. The responses of single units in the primary auditory cortex to brief sound stimuli were investigated in anesthetized cats. Each unit was characterized in terms of its sensitivity to tone pips of different frequencies, to bursts of white noise, and to short sequences of clicks. For each unit, the stimulus that caused the greatest increase in firing was selected and kept constant in frequency and intensity throughout the remainder of the experiment. 2. The duration of the stimulus and the interstimulus interval (ISI) were varied; 50ms stimuli were presented at intervals of either 550 or 900 ms, while 100-ms stimuli were presented at intervals of either 900 or 1,600 ms. Six sets of the selected stimulus, each comprising 100 presentations, were used to study each unit. Within each set the stimulus duration was kept constant, while the two ISIS assigned to the 50and IOO-ms stimuli, respectively, were used repeatedly or mixed randomly within the set. 3. The stimulus-evoked activity of each unit was analyzed as a function of stimulus duration, of ISI, and as a function of whether the IS1 was mixed or not. Changes in the rate of evoked activity related to any of the above variables were evaluated statistically, and trends in the responses to these variables were analyzed for the entire population of units. 4. A significant relationship between unit activity and IS1 was found. Increasing the IS1 from 550 to 900 ms or from 900 to 1,600 ms resulted in both instances in a 24% increase in the units’ rate of firing. Varying the ISI within each set did not produce a uniform effect over all the units. Mixing the two ISIS in a single set of stimulus presentations caused a reduction in response in 29% of the units, whereas an increase in evoked activity occurred in 14%. In the remaining 57% of the units no consistent trend was observed. 5. The effect of cycle-to-cycle IS1 variations on the response of single units was analyzed in terms of possible neural networks that would produce such effects. About 15% of the units behaved as if related to cortical networks with fixed properties, while most units in our sample appeared to be involved in cortical networks that either change their properties as a function of the IS1 or interact with each other in a time-dependent manner.
Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work

Introduction: Make Yourself Comfortable. 1. Qualitative Research: How Things Work. 2. Interpretation: The Person as Instrument. 3. Experiential Understanding: Most Qualitative Study Is Experiential. 4. Stating the Problem: Questioning How This Thing Works. 5. Methods: Gathering Data. 6. Review of Literature: Zooming to See the Problem. 7. Evidence: Bolstering Judgment and Reconnoitering. 8. Analysis and Synthesis: How Things Work. 9. Action Research and Self-Evaluation: Finding on Your Own How Your Place Works. 10. Storytelling: Illustrating How Things Work. 11. Writing the Final Report: An Iterative Convergence. 12. Advocacy and Ethics: Making Things Work Better.
Language independent and unsupervised acoustic models for speech recognition and keyword spotting

Copyright © 2014 ISCA. Developing high-performance speech processing systems for low-resource languages is very challenging. One approach to address the lack of resources is to make use of data from multiple languages. A popular direction in recent years is to train a multi-language bottleneck DNN. Language dependent and/or multi-language (all training languages) Tandem acoustic models (AM) are then trained. This work considers a particular scenario where the target language is unseen in multi-language training and has limited language model training data, a limited lexicon, and acoustic training data without transcriptions. A zero acoustic resources case is first described where a multilanguage AM is directly applied, as a language independent AM (LIAM), to an unseen language. Secondly, in an unsupervised approach a LIAM is used to obtain hypotheses for the target language acoustic data transcriptions which are then used in training a language dependent AM. 3 languages from the IARPA Babel project are used for assessment: Vietnamese, Haitian Creole and Bengali. Performance of the zero acoustic resources system is found to be poor, with keyword spotting at best 60% of language dependent performance. Unsupervised language dependent training yields performance gains. For one language (Haitian Creole) the Babel target is achieved on the in-vocabulary data.
Spatial information aided fine classification of hyperspectral images with similar spectrums

In hyperspectral images, there is abundant spectral information for classification. In most cases, spectral information based methods yield good classification results. However, different objects may have similar spectrums due to similar physical property. Spectral information based classification methods can't give accurate results for the similar physical property among objects belonging to the same main category. On the other hand, as the resolutions of sensors increase in recent years, more spatial information, such as shape and texture information can be extracted and described more precisely. In this paper, we proposed a spatial information aided similar spectral classification. In our method, spatial features, including the pixel shape index (PSI), and the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), are extracted for accurate classification. We compared the Bhattachary Distance before and after spatial information being aided and we found that the B Distance was amplified sharply, which indicated that the separability among classes increased. Classification is practiced on two hyperspectral data sets, Kennedy Space Center and Pavia City, and the proposed method is compared with classification based on different features. It is found that each feature makes contribution to classification and the accuracy of the proposed method is the highest among all methods, which certifies the effectiveness of our algorithm.
Upregulation of zinc transporter 2 in the blood–CSF barrier following lead exposure

Zinc (Zn) is an essential element for normal brain function; an abnormal Zn homeostasis in brain and the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) has been implied in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the mechanisms that regulate Zn transport in the blood–brain interface remain unknown. This study was designed to investigate Zn transport by the blood–CSF barrier (BCB) in the choroid plexus, with a particular focus on Zn transporter-2 (ZnT2), and to understand if lead (Pb) accumulation in the choroid plexus disturbed the Zn regulatory function in the BCB. Confocal microscopy, quantitative PCR and western blot demonstrated the presence of ZnT2 in the choroidal epithelia; ZnT2 was primarily in cytosol in freshly isolated plexus tissues but more toward the peripheral membrane in established choroidal Z310 cells. Exposure of rats to Pb (single ip injection of 50 mg Pb acetate/kg) for 24 h increased ZnT2 fluorescent signals in plexus tissues by confocal imaging and protein expression by western blot. Similar results were obtained by in vitro experiments using Z310 cells. Further studies using cultured cells and a two-chamber Transwell device showed that Pb treatment significantly reduced the cellular Zn concentration and led to an increased transport of Zn across the BCB, the effect that may be due to the increased ZnT2 by Pb exposure. Taken together, these results indicate that ZnT2 is present in the BCB; Pb exposure increases the ZnT2 expression in choroidal epithelial cells by a yet unknown mechanism and as a result, more Zn ions may be deposited into the intracellular Zn pool, leading to a relative Zn deficiency state in the cytoplasm at the BCB.
Perturbation of sphingolipid metabolism and ceramide production in HIV‐dementia

Infection by the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV‐1) often results in neurological dysfunction including HIV dementia (HIVD). Alterations in cytokine and redox balance are thought to play important roles in the pathogenesis of HIVD, but the specific mechanisms underlying neuronal dysfunction and death are unknown. Activation of cytokine receptors and oxidative stress can induce the production of ceramide from membrane sphingomyelin, and recent findings suggest that ceramide is an important mediator of a form of programmed cell death called apoptosis. We now report that levels of ceramide, sphingomyelin, and hydroxynonenal (HNE) are significantly increased in brain tissues and cerebrospinal fluid of HIVD patients. Exposure of cultured neurons to the neurotoxic HIV proteins gp120 and Tat resulted in increased cellular levels of sphingomyelin, ceramide, and HNE. The ceramide precursor palmitoyl‐CoA sensitized neurons to Tat and gp120 toxicity, whereas an inhibitor of ceramide production reduced Tat and gp120‐induced increases of ceramide and HNE and protected the neurons from Tat and gp120‐induced death. These results suggest that HIV‐1 infection may promote a lipid imbalance in neural cells, resulting in an overproduction of ceramide and consequent cellular dysfunction and death.
Mathematical Modeling of General Inaccurate Adders

Inaccurate circuits make possible the conservation of limited resources, such as energy. But effective design of such circuits requires an understanding of resulting tradeoffs between accuracy and design parameters, such as voltages and speed of execution. Although studies of tradeoffs have been done on specific circuits, the applicability of those studies is narrow. This paper presents a comprehensive and mathematically rigorous method for analyzing a large class of inaccurate circuits for addition. Furthermore, it presents new, fast algorithms for the computation of key statistical measures of inaccuracy in such adders, thus helping hardware architects explore the design space with greater confidence.
MIMO Gaussian broadcast channels with confidential and common messages

This paper considers the problem of secret communication over a two-receiver multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian broadcast channel. The transmitter has two independent, confidential messages and a common message. Each of the confidential messages is intended for one of the receivers but needs to be kept perfectly secret from the other, and the common message is intended for both receivers. It is shown that a natural scheme that combines secret dirty-paper coding with Gaussian superposition coding achieves the secrecy capacity region. To prove this result, a channel-enhancement approach and an extremal entropy inequality of Weingarten et al. are used.
Quantum Nondemolition Measurement of a Nonclassical State of a Massive Object

By coupling a macroscopic mechanical oscillator to two microwave cavities, we simultaneously prepare and monitor a nonclassical steady state of mechanical motion. In each cavity, correlated radiation pressure forces induced by two coherent drives engineer the coupling between the quadratures of light and motion. We, first, demonstrate the ability to perform a continuous quantum nondemolition measurement of a single mechanical quadrature at a rate that exceeds the mechanical decoherence rate, while avoiding measurement backaction by more than 13 dB. Second, we apply this measurement technique to independently verify the preparation of a squeezed state in the mechanical oscillator, resolving quadrature fluctuations 20% below the quantum noise.
On lexicon creation for turkish LVCSR

In this paper, we address the lexicon design problem in Turkish large vocabulary speech recognition. Although we focus only on Turkish, the methods described here are general enough that they can be considered for other agglutinative languages like Finnish, Korean etc. In an agglutinative language, several words can be created from a single root word using a rich collection of morphological rules. So, a virtually infinite size lexicon is required to cover the language if words are used as the basic units. The standard approach to this problem is to discover a number of primitive units so that a large set of words can be created by compounding those units. Two broad classes of methods are available for splitting words into their sub-units; morphology-based and data-driven methods. Although the word splitting significantly reduces the out of vocabulary rate, it shrinks the context and increases acoustic confusibility. We have used two methods to address the latter. In one method, we use word counts to avoid splitting of high frequency lexical units, and in the other method, we recompound splits according to a probabilistic measure. We present experimental results that show the methods are very effective to lower the word error rate at the expense of lexicon size.
Teacher education for inclusion across Europe

Former les enseignants a l’inclusion en EuropeLes questions liees a la formation des enseignants ont une place prioritaire dans le programme politique a travers l’Europe et elles ont ete soulevees dans des nombreuses communications au niveau europeen comme au niveau international. Cet article propose de donner rapidement une vue d’ensemble du contexte politique actuel en matiere de formation a l’inclusion des enseignants en Europe. Cet article presentera aussi une information sur le projet de formation des enseignants a l’inclusion de l’Agence europeenne pour le developpement de l’education des personnes a besoins particuliers qui met l’accent sur certaines recommandations emergentes dans ce domaine de travail important. Le projet apporte certains elements de pratiques concretes comportant des rapports detailles sur la politique et les pratiques dans les pays membres, ainsi qu’une vaste bibliographie sur la litterature europeenne et internationale. Les informations sur le projet, de meme que les rapports sur la politique et les pratiques de tous les pays membres peuvent etre consultes sur : http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion
High-resolution MRI in evaluation of the surgical anatomy of the esophagus and posterior mediastinum.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to use high-resolution MRI to evaluate the surgical anatomy of the posterior mediastinum, in particular the esophagus and its relation to the surrounding structures. The aim was to familiarize radiologists with the appearance of structures considered important in planning surgical resection of the esophagus. MATERIALS AND METHODS The thoraces of two cadavers were imaged with a 1.5-T magnet using a high-resolution T2-weighted sequence. Axial cadaveric sections of the posterior mediastinum were cut with a band saw at levels determined from the MR images, and histologic whole-mount sections of the esophagus and surrounding tissue were prepared from the cadaveric sections. The appearance of structures identified on the MR images was compared with the findings on corresponding gross anatomic and histologic whole-mount sections. RESULTS The MR images depicted the esophagus and structures in close anatomic relation: the pleural reflections and pericardium. The technique enabled visualization of structures to our knowledge not previously described on cross-sectional imaging: the individual layers of the esophageal wall, the thoracic duct, a connective tissue layer attaching the esophagus to the anterior wall of the aorta, and a fascial plane passing between layers of the right and left parietal pleura posterior to the esophagus. CONCLUSION High-resolution MRI of the posterior mediastinum provides detailed anatomic information, delineating structures not visible on other forms of cross-sectional imaging. It can provide important information for planning surgical intervention.