Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Occupational Acrylonitrile Exposure and Lung Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

The present work summarizes the currently available published studies on lung cancer and occupational acrylonitrile exposure. Meta-analytic methods were used to estimate the overall risk. To adjust for the healthy worker effect, rate ratio estimates based on regression analyses and ratios of standard mortality ratios were aggregated. Overall effect estimates were 0.95 (95% CI 0.86 to 1.06) and 1.25 (95% CI 1.10 to 1.43) before and after adjustment for the healthy worker effect, respectively. Therefore, a 25% increase in lung cancer risk attributable to occupational acrylonitrile exposure is suggested. Possible contribution of smoking confounding the increased risk cannot be fully excluded.
The Influence of Paragraph Information on the Processing of Upcoming Words.

THREE EXPERIMENTS were performed to examine how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. We asked U.S. college students to read contextually constraining paragraphs and decide whether the final word was a word or not (lexical decision). The paragraphs included discourse-level information that was either consistent or inconsistent with the context of the sentence immedi-
Pseudorabies Virus Glycoprotein gD Contains a Functional Endocytosis Motif That Acts in Concert with an Endocytosis Motif in gB To Drive Internalization of Antibody-Antigen Complexes from the Surface of Infected Monocytes

ABSTRACT Viral glycoproteins gB and gD of the swine alphaherpesvirus pseudorabies virus (PRV), which is closely related to human herpes simplex virus and varicella-zoster virus, are able to drive internalization of antibody-antigen complexes that may form at the cell surface of infected monocytes, thereby protecting these cells from efficient antibody-mediated lysis. We found earlier that gB relies on an endocytosis motif in its cytoplasmic domain for its function during this internalization process. Here, we report that the PRV gD protein also contains a functional endocytosis motif (YRLL) in its cytoplasmic domain that drives spontaneous endocytosis of gD from the cell surface early in infection and that acts in concert with the endocytosis motif in gB to contribute to efficient internalization of antibody-antigen complexes in PRV-infected monocytes.
Comparison of commercial kits for the extraction of DNA from paddy soils

The objective of this study was to compare the extraction efficiency of commercial DNA kits by evaluating the quantity and purity of DNA extracts obtained from paddy soils. DNA was extracted from three paddy soils using the FastDNA® SPIN kit for soil (FD), the innuSPEED soil DNA kit (INS) and the NucleoSpin® soil kit (NSP). DNA extracts were analysed by agarose gel electrophoresis and UV spectroscopy. Polymerase chain reaction–denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR‐DGGE) analyses were conducted to evaluate the potential bias of the DNA extractions on fingerprinting techniques. Regarding the quantity and the purity of the extracted DNA, the NSP kit was detected superior to the FD kit, while the INS kit failed to extract detectable amounts of DNA. DGGE fingerprints generated from PCR products (FD, NSP) showed high levels of similarity for the amplified 16S rRNA genes of methanogenic archaea (>95%) and bacteria (up to 100%) in each soil. This study suggested that the recently introduced NSP kit allowed for the adjustment of the lysis buffer composition to the soil of interest and is at least equivalent to the well‐established FD kit for the extraction of DNA from paddy soils.
Utility-Based Flexible Resource Allocation for Integrated LTE-U and LTE Wireless Systems

LTE on unlicensed bands is a promising strategy in the future communication system. In order to improve the efficiency of resource utilization for LTE operating on both licensed and unlicensed bands, a flexible resource allocation scheme based on utility function is proposed. This scheme optimizes the resource allocation by integrating and dynamically adjusting the resource on licensed bands and unlicensed bands. At the same time, the utility function in this scheme can guarantee the tradeoff between system efficiency and user fairness. Finally, numeric simulation results are given to demonstrate that by comparing with the present cooperation mechanism the performance of the integrated wireless system is improved through the scheme we propose.
Early Failure Detection and Diagnostics of Self-Aligning Journal Bearing through Vibro-acoustic Analysis

Journal bearings are widely used to support the rotor of industrial machinery with high loads, such as steam turbines, centrifugal pump and compressors. The problem of journal bearings can cause catastrophic failures, results in huge economic loss and create high safety risks. It is necessary to develop effective condition monitoring technologies to detect and diagnose the failures at early stage. Many researchers have studied the low frequency vibration characteristics as well as the high frequency vibration and acoustics emission in the detection of journal bearing failure. However, these studies have shown relatively little information regarding to the vibro-acoustic characteristics of the self aligning journal bearings. This research focuses on understanding the full feature of vibroacoustics in association with the influence of radial, torsion load, radial load, shaft speed and lubricant viscosity properties in order to develop an more reliable way to monitoring journal bearings.
Helping Clients, Helping Ourselves: A Social Work Agenda for Achieving Occupational Equity

This article explores the glass-ceiling barriers and pay inequities experienced by women who are employed in the nonprofit human services. In addition, it reviews past and current initiatives to ameliorate gender discrimination and discrepancies between equal opportunity policies and continued marketplace realities and presents implications for policy development, social action, research, and practice.
An analytical model for reliability evaluation of cloud service provisioning systems

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, the reliability of cloud services has become a key concern of cloud service providers and users. Several researchers have studied the problem of cloud service reliability assurance. However, the complexity of the cloud service provisioning system and the deep dependency stack of its layered architecture make it challenging to evaluate the reliability of cloud services. In this paper, we propose a novel analytical model of cloud service provisioning systems reliability. Further, we provide a detailed methodology for evaluating cloud service reliability using reliability block diagrams and probabilistic methods. The proposed model can be used by cloud providers to assure the reliability of their cloud services. The results of a case study using simulated cloud computing infrastructure verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Complete Protection against Lethal Toxoplasma gondii Infection in Mice Immunized with a Plasmid Encoding theSAG1 Gene

ABSTRACT Infection with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondiiis transmitted to humans from infected animals by tissue cysts and oocysts excreted by cats. Immunization with inactivated parasites or recombinant proteins has at best shown partial protection. We constructed a plasmid expressing the SAG1 surface antigen of T. gondii, p1tPASAG1, and showed that animals immunized with the plasmid produce anti-SAG1 antibodies which recognize the native SAG1. Mice immunized with p1tPASAG1 showed 80 to 100% protection against challenge with the non-cyst-producing, virulent RH isolate, compared to an 80% mortality in mice immunized with empty plasmid, which is the greatest efficacy of any vaccine against T. gondii produced so far. The SAG1 molecule was analyzed for potential cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes, and four peptides with the best fit were synthesized. The ability of the peptides to stimulate gamma interferon production by CD8+ T cells from p1tPASAG1-immunized mice was tested in an ELISPOT assay, and one new CTL epitope was identified. Adoptive transfer of CD8+ T cells from p1tPASAG1-immunized to naı̈ve mice showed partial protection. In conclusion, DNA vaccination with p1tPASAG1 gave effective protection in mice againstT. gondii infection and the protection could be adoptively transferred by purified CD8+ T cells.
Are Hopeful Employees More Creative? An Empirical Study

We studied how employees' hope explains their creativity at work, both directly and through the mediation of happiness. One hundred and twenty-five individuals reported their hope and happiness, their supervisors having reported their creativity. Factor analyses suggested two hope factors (waypower; composite hope) and three creativity dimensions (novel ideas; creative ideas; ideas championing). The main findings were the following: (a) the composite hope predicted all creativity dimensions, the waypower dimension predicted only the ideas championing dimension; and (b) the composite hope measure also predicted creativity through the mediating role of happiness.
The evaluation of university courses

ABSTRACT University and college courses are frequently evaluated in order to help lecturers improve the course in subsequent years, but there are also other reasons why courses might be evaluated. After listing these the article describes the system of course evaluations which have been developed in the Australian National University. Suggested sources of data are given, from which lecturers may make informed judgements about changes needed in their courses or teaching. The article also gives examples of questions used for gathering these data.
Integration of Novel Image Based Features into Markov Random Field Model for Information Retrieval

This paper develops a general and formal frame-work for the ranking of web documents by considering the multimedia information contained in these documents. Multimedia information is mostly related to images and videos. Ranking can be treated as a combination of static and dynamic ranking. In this paper, we have described a static ranking method based on the analysis of the images present in the web document and integrated it into the ranking framework which is based on Markov Random Field Model, which combines both static and dynamic ranking. We have described a novel metric DQEV(Document Quality Enhancing Value), based on the images present in a web document and the value of DQEV indicates to what extent the images in a web document increase its value. Integration of an Image Search Engine has also been proposed for the computation of DQEV. It has also been shown that the integration of DQEV can increase the effectiveness of the ranking system.
Organizing for social change within concertive control systems: Member identification, empowerment, and the masking of discipline

The Grameen (“rural”) Bank organizes grassroots micro‐enterprises for productive self‐employment and social change among the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh. It provides collateral‐free loans and various social services for the poor, but maintains a 99 percent loan recovery rate. Many of the bank's more than two million members, 94 percent of whom are women, attribute their present well‐being to its ameliorative qualities. Using the theory of concertive control, we gained insight into why members and workers identify so strongly with the Grameen, how participation within this organization offers opportunities for empowerment, and how control systems operative within the bank account for its success. This theory also enabled us to examine how member and worker identification with the Grameen influences their evaluation of the disciplinary techniques that are part of the system. By examining the Grameen's organizational processes in terms of the theory of concertive control, we identify some of the parado.
Kalman filtering with intermittent observations: Bounds on the error covariance distribution

When measurements are subject to random losses, the covariance of the estimation error of a state estimator becomes a random variable. In this paper we present bounds on the cumulative distribution function of the covariance of the estimation error for a discrete time linear system. We also show that the bounds can be arbitrarily tight if sufficient computational power is available. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method provides tighter bounds than the ones available in the literature.
A Fast Attribute Based Encryption

Our new Access Control Encryption is an implementation of CP-ABE, when used as part of a key delivery mechanism for an encrypted Data Base. It focuses on improving performance. In ACE the access policies are any predicates over the set of object attributes. E¢ ciency gains are most pronounced when the DNF representations of policies are compact. In ACE, within the life span of the keys, each user has to perform very few ABE decryptions, regardless of the number of policies accessible to her. Keys to most objects are then computed using only symmetric key decryptions. ACE is not the rst to utilize symmetric key cryptography to reduce the number of CP-ABE operations, when access policies form a multi-level partially ordered set. However, in addition to this signi cant saving, ACE also takes advantage of overlaps among policies on clauses of the policies, thus further reducing computational complexity. Let R denote the number of user roles, N be the number of object access policies, k the ratio between the cost of CP-ABE encryption and symmetric key encryption complexities (for 10 attributes k 10), and N = cR: The gain factor of ACE vs. a competing hybrid system is = kc=(k + c): Usually c >> 1; but in some systems it may happen that c < 1: ACE is composed of two sub systems encrypting the same messages: A CP-ABE and a symmetric key encryption system. We prove that ACE is secure under a new Uniform Security Game that we propose and justify, assuming that its building blocks, namely CP-ABE and block ciphers are secure. We require that CP-ABE be secure under the Selective Set Model, and that the block cipher be secure under Multi-User CPA, which we de ne. We present Policy Encryption (PE) that can replace CP-ABE as a component of ACE. In many cases, PE is more e¢ cient than CP-ABE. However PE does not prevent collusions. Instead it limits collusions. PE is useful in those cases where owners can compartmentalize objects and subjects, so that within each compartment the owners can tolerate collusions. PE prevents inter compartmental collusions. PE has also the following appealing properties: It relies on older hence more reliable intractability assumption, the Computational Di¢ e-Hellman assumption, whereas CP-ABE relies on the newer Bilinear Di¢ e-Hellman assumption. PE uses o¤-the shelf standard crypto building blocks with one small modi cation, with proven security. For a small number of compartments PE is much faster than CP-ABE. PE and CP-ABE can coexist in the same system, where ABE is used in high security compartments. We apply ACE to a practical nancial example, the Consolidate Audit Trail (CAT), which is expected to become the largest repository of nancial data in the world.
Macro-History as Metaphor for Biography: An Essay on Macro and Micro History

The article is an effort to relate biography, the history of an individual, and sociography, the history of a society. The focus is on the deeper aspects of both; on personality in the case of the individual and cosmology or deeper structure for the society. Eight models of the phases of human personality, and eight models of the phases or stages of social deep structure are then presented, with efforts to use the personal models on society and the social models on personality. The article is an exercise in the possible isomorphism between the two. The cyclical theories which applied to societies were found particularly useful in modeling individual life-cycles; the linear theories less so because they "condemn" the individual to a definite final state of affairs.
An Adaptive Algorithm for License Plate Orientation and Character Segmentation

Based on the sharing features of a variety of license plates (LP), the vertical edge was first detected by sobel color edge detector. Then, some approaches were adopted to adaptively remove the invalid edge regarding the characteristics of edge grayscale jump and edge density, so that the regions having features of LP were preserved. Next, by edge density template matching and the mean and variance of grayscale jump points, the LP region was rapidly searched. Then, color-reversing judgment was conducted by color analysis, and binarization was done based on edge detection. Afterward, characters were segmented by means of mathematical morphology (MM) and connected components analysis. With an abundant samples verified in dark hours and daytime under real conditions, the experiment indicates that it is feasible to adopt this algorithm in license plate recognition system(LPRS) to achieve accuracy and adaptability.
Effects of Exogenous Insoluble Glucan Primer on Insoluble Glucan Synthesis by Streptococcus mutans

The synthesis of water-insoluble glucan by a glucosyltransferase preparation from Streptococcus mutans is associated with a lag period lasting several minutes. The addition of small amounts of glucan containing significant amounts of α-(1→3) linkages causes a marked reduction of the lag 'period with little change in the reaction rate. A similar effect was not observed with other glucans, such as dextran, dextrin, and cellulose.
Predicting Shrinkage in the Multiple Correlation Coefficient

one sample from a defined population, we are often interested in determining how accurate this same equation would be in predicting the same criterion variable for new samples from the same population. Several formulas have been developed for determining the amount of shrinkage to expect in the multiple correlation coefficient (R) when a regression equation from one sample is used with a new sample. This study compares the three estimates of new sample Rs given by using Wherry’s original formula (1931), a modified version (McNemar, 1962; Lord and Novick, 1968), and a formula by Lord (1950), with the actual calculated values of R from the
Evidence for a Functional Quorum-Sensing Type AI-1 System in the Extremophilic Bacterium Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans

ABSTRACT Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans is one of the main acidophilic chemolithotrophic bacteria involved in the bioleaching of metal sulfide ores. The bacterium-mineral interaction requires the development of biofilms, whose formation is regulated in many microorganisms by type AI-1 quorum sensing. Here, we report the existence and characterization of a functional type AI-1 quorum-sensing system in A. ferrooxidans. This microorganism produced mainly acyl-homoserine lactones (AHL) with medium and large acyl chains and different C-3 substitutions, including 3-hydroxy-C8-AHL, 3-hydroxy-C10-AHL, C12-AHL, 3-oxo-C12-AHL, 3-hydroxy-C12-AHL, C14-AHL, 3-oxo-C14-AHL, 3-hydroxy-C14-AHL, and 3-hydroxy-C16-AHL. A quorum-sensing genetic locus that includes two open reading frames, afeI and afeR, which have opposite orientations and code for proteins with high levels of similarity to members of the acyl synthase (I) and transcriptional regulator (R) protein families, respectively, was identified. Overexpression of AfeI in Escherichia coli and the associated synthesis of AHLs confirmed that AfeI is an AHL synthase. As determined by reverse transcription-PCR, the afeI and afeR genes were transcribed in A. ferrooxidans. The transcription levels of the afeI gene were higher in cells grown in sulfur and thiosulfate media than in iron-grown cells. Phosphate starvation induced an increase in the transcription levels of afeI which correlated with an increase in AHL levels. Two afe boxes which could correspond to the AfeR binding sites were identified upstream of the afeI gene. This is the first report of a functional type AI-1 quorum-sensing system in an acidophilic chemolithotrophic microorganism, and our results provide a very interesting opportunity to explore the control and regulation of biofilm formation during the bioleaching process.
Backstage Discourse and the Emergence of Organizational Voices: Exploring Graffiti and Organization

The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing that this form of communication forms constitutes an alternative public sphere for expressive and political voices. Public bathroom graffiti is interesting due to its unique spatial and textual affordances. In particular, anonymity of such spaces promotes voice and dialogue while insulating actors from social conformity pressures. This discursive relation to space produces dense and polyphonic communicative acts, allowing authors to tackle important social and organizational questions, engage in self-conscious reflection, and express taboo emotions. A 3-year study of organizational graffiti is presented, followed by a description of how the graffiti studies composed an expressive political space within the organization. Implications of the graffiti included the decentralized production of organizational voices, the problematizing of the notions of public and private, and the possibilities of political expression within organizational spaces.
College binge drinking: a new approach

Purpose – The proportion of young people binge drinking continues to grow despite extensive research efforts aiming to reverse this growing trend. Binge drinking has typically been viewed as the consumption of five or more standard drinks or units in a single drinking session. Research on binge drinking is US centric and largely quantitative. This paper, using qualitative methods, aims to gain richer insights into binge drinking.Design/methodology/approach – Seven focus groups involving 36 participants were conducted in Poland and Canada. Focus group data were transcribed and analysed.Findings – Three distinct types of binge drinking were identified. The authors termed these initiation, indulgence and moderation. The paper details how each type of binge drinking can be distinguished through different attitudes and drinking behaviours.Research limitations/implications – Any observations made in this paper are restricted by the sample used and the methodology employed, and therefore cannot be uncritically g.
Folksonomies behind the scenes

In this position paper we analyze the similarities amongst folksonomies, semantic wikis, and ontology building; we also propose an alignment and orchestration of ontologies representing these scenarios. We argue that such alignment enables a more direct application of folksonomybased approaches over these set-ups. The rationale behind folksonomies is shared across environments such as collaborative ontology building and semantic wikis. The three of them aim to facilitate knowledge sharing across communities; a social environment in which individual and community objectives are achieved supports them all.
Qualitative Dimensions in Question Answering: Extending the Definitional QA Task

Current question answering tasks handle definitional questions by seeking answers which are factual in nature. While factual answers are a very important component in defining entities, a wealth of qualitative data is often ignored. In this incipient work, we define qualitative dimensions (credibility, sentiment, contradictions etc.) for evaluating answers to definitional questions and we explore potential benefits to users. These qualitative dimensions are leveraged to uncover indirect and implicit answers and can help satisfy the user's information need.