Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolution of the primary and secondary structures of the E1a mRNAs of the adenovirus.

In this paper we investigate and compare (evolutionary) patterns in the primary and secondary structure of four homologous E1a mRNAs of the adenovirus. Our main results are as follows: (1) The similarity of the coding regions of the mRNA sequences reflects both similarity in function (i.e., oncogenicity) and evolutionary divergence. (2) The similarity of the leader and the trailer regions reflects host specificity (i.e., human or simian) and must therefore arise from convergence. (3) Minimal energy foldings of the mRNAs show similar secondary structures (in particular around the splice sites). The conservation of pre-mRNA secondary structure shows that mRNAs are subject to selection constraints in addition to those associated with proteins. (4) The conserved secondary (helical) structures consist of nonhomologous subsequences, i.e., shifts have occurred. The observed shifts near the splice sites seem to be the simplest way of dealing with the dual constraints.
Knockdown of the Sodium-Dependent Phosphate Co-Transporter 2b (NPT2b) Suppresses Lung Tumorigenesis

The sodium-dependent phosphate co-transporter 2b (NPT2b) plays an important role in maintaining phosphate homeostasis. In previous studies, we have shown that high dietary inorganic phosphate (Pi) consumption in mice stimulated lung tumorigenesis and increased NPT2b expression. NPT2b has also been found to be highly expressed in human lung cancer tissues. The association of high expression of NPT2b in the lung with poor prognosis in oncogenic lung diseases prompted us to test whether knockdown of NPT2b may regulate lung cancer growth. To address this issue, aerosols that contained small interfering RNA (siRNA) directed against NPT2b (siNPT2b) were delivered into the lungs of K-ras LA1 mice, which constitute a murine model reflecting human lung cancer. Our results clearly showed that repeated aerosol delivery of siNPT2b successfully suppressed lung cancer growth and decreased cancer cell proliferation and angiogenesis, while facilitating apoptosis. These results strongly suggest that NPT2b plays a role lung tumorigenesis and represents a novel target for lung cancer therapy.
The origin of the light distribution in spiral galaxies

We analyse a high-resolution, fully cosmological, hydrodynamical disc galaxy simulation, to study the source of the double-exponential light profiles seen in many stellar discs, and the effects of stellar radial migration upon the spatiotemporal evolution of both the disc age and metallicity distributions. We find a ‘break’ in the pure exponential stellar surface brightness profile, and trace its origin to a sharp decrease in the star formation per unit surface area, itself produced by a decrease in the gas volume density due to a warping of the gas disc. Star formation in the disc continues well beyond the break. We find that the break is more pronounced in bluer wavebands. By contrast, we find little or no break in the mass density profile. This is, in part, due to the net radial migration of stars towards the external parts of the disc. Beyond the break radius, we find that ∼60 per cent of the resident stars migrated from the inner disc, while ∼25 per cent formed in situ. Our simulated galaxy also has a minimum in the age profile at the break radius but, in disagreement with some previous studies, migration is not the main mechanism producing this shape. In our simulation, the disc metallicity gradient flattens with time, consistent with an ‘inside-out’ formation scenario. We do not find any difference in the intensity or the position of the break with inclination, suggesting that perhaps the differences found in empirical studies are driven by dust extinction.
Elements of a neurobiological theory of hippocampal function: the role of synaptic plasticity, synaptic tagging and schemas

The 2004 EJN Lecture was an attempt to lay out further aspects of a developing neurobiological theory of hippocampal function [Morris, R.G. M. , Moser, E.I. , Riedel, G. , Martin, S.J., Sandin, J., Day, M. & O'Carroll, C. (2003) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci., 358, 773–786. ] These are that (i) activity‐dependent synaptic plasticity plays a key role in the automatic encoding and initial storage of attended experience; (ii) the persistence of hippocampal synaptic potentiation over time can be influenced by other independent neural events happening closely in time, an idea with behavioural implications for memory; and (iii) that systems‐level consolidation of memory traces within neocortex is guided both by hippocampal traces that have been subject to cellular consolidation and by the presence of organized schema in neocortex into which relevant newly encoded information might be stored. Hippocampal memory is associative and, to study it more effectively than with previous paradigms, a new learning task is described which is unusual in requiring the incidental encoding of flavour–place paired associates, with the readout of successful storage being successful recall of a place given the flavour with which it was paired. NMDA receptor‐dependent synaptic plasticity is shown to be critical for the encoding and intermediate storage of memory traces in this task, while AMPA receptor‐mediated fast synaptic transmission is necessary for memory retrieval. Typically, these rapidly encoded traces decay quite rapidly over time. Synaptic potentiation also decays rapidly, but can be rendered more persistent by a process of cellular consolidation in which synaptic tagging and capture play a key part in determining whether or not it will be persistent. Synaptic tags set at the time of an event, even many trivial events, can capture the products of the synthesis of plasticity proteins set in train by events before, during or even after an event to be remembered. Tag–protein interactions stabilize synaptic potentiation and, by implication, memory. The behavioural implications of tagging are explored. Finally, using a different protocol for flavour–place paired associate learning, it is shown that rats can develop a spatial schema which represents the relative locations of several different flavours of food hidden at places within a familiar space. This schema is learned gradually but, once acquired, enables new paired associates to be encoded and stored in one trial. Their incorporation into the schema prevents rapid forgetting and suggests that schema play a key and hitherto unappreciated role in systems‐level memory consolidation. The elements of what may eventually mature into a more formal neurobiological theory of hippocampal memory are laid out as specific propositions with detailed conceptual discussion and reference to recent data.
Patterns of Researchers’ Social Mobility and Scientific Capital: Russian Case

Changes in financing structures of science and education foster the restructuring of scientific personnel market and its mobility. The author presents a conceptual model of scientists’ social mobility that reflects its dependence on the social processes that take place in an academic community and their connection with scientific capital. This model allows a complex analysis of doctorate holders. There are core trends in scientists’ social shifts in the professional sphere (inter-sectoral, institutional, international, etc.), their second employment and their shifts in specialization.
Analyzing for Effective Entrepreneurship Strategy: A Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation Course

As they grow, companies that were once characterised as agile, innovative and entrepreneurial, tend to become bureaucratic and slow to respond to changes in their environments. In order to stay competitive and build competitive advantage, managers realise that they have to rejuvenate the entrepreneurial spirit and innovate on a sustainable basis, yet this remains a significant challenge for them. Our corporate entrepreneurship and innovation course for post-graduate studentscultivates and understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of established business. Its unique design, which follows a logical progression of data collection in real-life participating organizations through secondary and primary research, assures in-depth understanding of the factors that shape the current organizational profiles. Students, working in teams, draw on this data and entrepreneurship and innovation theory to develop practical corporate entrepreneurship development plans which they present to their ‘clients’. These plans reflect leadership orientation represented by entrepreneurial visions and strategies, as well as contextualised factors for control in the form of innovation processes and tools. Finally, teams recommend a range of tactics that foster supportive environments for entrepreneurship and innovation. In the process of doing so, students are themselves transformed from being traditional managers to becoming entrepreneurial managers.
AirConditioning - a Modelica Library for Dynamic Simulation of AC Systems

The AirConditioning library is a new, commercial Modelica library for the steady-state and transient simulation of air conditioning systems using modern, compact heat exchangers that use microchannel tubes instead of the bulkier fin-and-tube type heat exchangers. Currently it is mostly used by automotive OEMs and suppliers that need high-accuracy system level models to ensure both passenger comfort and energy efficiency of systems developed under the pressure of reduced design cycle times. The AirConditioning library contains basic correlations for heat and mass transfer and pressure drop, components for control volumes and flow resistances and advanced readyto-use models for all relevant components of automotive air conditioning systems like condenser, evaporator, compressor, expansion devices and accumulator.
An Efficient Approach of Power Reducing for Scratch-Pad Memory Based Embedded Systems

Scratch-pad memory (SPM) is widely used in embedded systems. It is a topical and crucial subject to reduce power consumption for SPM systems, since high power consumption can reduce systems reliability and increase the cost and size of heat sinks. In this paper, we propose an effective approach of power reducing to scale down voltage and frequency as much as possible. We first pipelined data transference and processing. Second, we find the comparative time slack between fast data processing and low data transference, and then provide both single and dynamic scaling to reduce power consumption. We conduct our approach on the simulator of Trim ran, and the experimental results show that the approach achieves significant power reduction improvement while the run-time performance outperforms previous work.
Politics and Public Goods in Developing Countries: Evidence from the Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

This paper employs an instrumental variables strategy to identify the effect of party ideology on policy outcomes. Exogenous variation in party representation is generated by the assassination of the leader of the Congress party, which occurred midway through India's national elections in 1991, and dramatically increased the probability of Congress victory for a subset of constituencies. Representation by the Congress party leads to a substantial increase in the provision of public goods favored by the poor, consistent with the party's expressed populist agenda. Among the salient changes are increases in the availability of drinking water and primary education, and declines in agricultural and industrial electrification and telephone coverage. I compare these effects to those obtained using a regression discontinuity design, and find that the latter yields little effect of Congress representation on public goods allocations.
Defect Detection in Aluminium with an Eddy Currents Sensor

The purpose of this paper is to present an eddy current testing technique for surface defect detection in conducting materials using a giant magneto resistive (GMR) sensor. A flat coil is used to produce an alternate magnetic field, which gives rise to eddy currents in the material under test. The GMR sensor with the coil placed on top of it is mounted in a holder, which is moved over the surface of the metal plate using an XY table. Three aluminium plates were used with defects having nominals depths of 2, 4, 6, and 8 mm and widths of 0.6, 1 and 1.4 mm, respectively. The defects were scanned with the sensing axis perpendicular to the defect length. The GMR output voltage depends on the width and depth of the defects. Two parameters extracted from the GMR output voltage signal are obtained and a simple correlation between the defects dimensions and the GMR output voltage is proposed.
Cryptography for Parallel RAM from Indistinguishability Obfuscation

Since many cryptographic schemes are about performing computation on data, it is important to consider a computation model which captures the prominent features of modern system architecture. Parallel random access machine (PRAM) is such an abstraction which not only models multiprocessor platforms, but also new frameworks supporting massive parallel computation such as MapReduce. In this work, we explore the feasibility of designing cryptographic solutions for the PRAM model of computation to achieve security while leveraging the power of parallelism and random data access. We demonstrate asymptotically optimal solutions for a wide-range of cryptographic tasks based on indistinguishability obfuscation. In particular, we construct the first publicly verifiable delegation scheme with privacy in the persistent database setting, which allows a client to privately delegate both computation and data to a server with optimal efficiency. Specifically, the server can perform PRAM computation on private data with parallel efficiency preserved (up to poly-logarithmic overhead). Our results also cover succinct randomized encoding, searchable encryption, functional encryption, secure multiparty computation, and indistinguishability obfuscation for PRAM. We obtain our results in a modular way through a notion of computational-trace indistinguishability obfuscation (CiO), which may be of independent interests.
A Performance Comparison Study of End-to-End Congestion Control Protocols over MIMO Fading Channels

We study the performance of end-to-end congestion control protocols, namely, VCP and TCP/AQM+ECN over wireless topologies created by MIMO fading channel links. We model the loss characteristic of such links with finite-state Markov chains the parameters of which can be derived from the fading channel specifications. We also investigate the effects of utilizing forward error correction (FEC) techniques at the link layer in order to improve the performance of the above congestion control protocols. Our numerical results are generated utilizing NS2 discrete-event simulator. Our results show that without using link layer FEC techniques, the performance of both VCP and TCP/AQM+ECN in wireless networks can be significantly degraded. Further, they show that the use of MIMO links can significantly improve the performance of the protocols of our study
Impact of Modeling Languages on the Theory and Practice in Planning Research

We propose revisions to the research agenda in Automated Planning. The proposal is based on a review of the role of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) in the activities of the AI planning community and the impact of PDDL on parts of its research agenda. We specifically show how specific properties of PDDL have impacted research on planning, by putting emphasis on certain research topics and complicating others. We argue that the development of more advanced modeling languages would be — analogously to the impact PDDL has had — a low overhead and smooth route for the ICAPS community shift its research focus to increasingly promising and relevant research topics.
FRISK: Keyword Query Cleaning and Processing in Action

In this demo, we will showcase the prototype system FRISK (for Finding Relational Views Using Structured Keyword Queries) for supporting keyword queries in relational databases. Two salient features that set our prototype apart from existing systems and will be demonstrated are: (1) It supports keyword query cleaning; and (2) It offers an efficient way to search for the proper data subspace related to the keyword query.
Test of the Bank Lending Channel: The Case of Australia

Extending Bernanke and Blinder (1988, 1992), Kashyap and Stein (2000), Peek and Rosengren (2010) and others, this paper incorporates two additonal variables - the world interest rate and the exchange rate - into the bank loan supply function. The results show that the demand for bank loans is negatively affected by the lending rate and positively influenced by the interest rate on bonds and real GDP and that the supply of bank loans is positively associated with the lending rate, bank deposits and appreciation of the Australian dollar and negatively impacted by the world interest rate and the cost of borrowings as represented by the target cash rate. Therefore, the bank lending channel is confirmed. In monetary easing, the Reserve Bank of Australia can engage in open market operations to buy government bonds to increase bank deposits/reserves or lower the target cash rate to reduce the cost of borrowings. Both measures will cause the supply of bank loans to rise.
An Efficient Shared-tree-Based Multi-source Multicast Routing Protocol in Mobile Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a distributed wireless network. The characteristics such as free mobility, self configuration, and fast deployment make MANETs suitable for various tasks. Multicasting can efficiently support a variety of applications and services. Most of the existing multicast routing protocols in MANETs consider only one source in a multicast group and become inefficient when the protocol is extended to multi-source multicasting. In this paper, we propose a shared-tree-based multi-source multicast routing protocol (STMRP) to provide efficient multicasting in the multi-source multicast environment. The proposed shared forwarding tree and multi-path routing preserve multicast efficiency as well as robustness. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol maintains the delivery ratio without losing multicast efficiency in the multi-source multicast environment.
Cost Efficient Joint Liability Lending

Traditional micro-lending schemes suffer from high transaction costs relative to the loan size, which renders many small loans uneconomical. This paper proposes an alternative lending protocol with lower transaction costs and shows that in theory repayment rates are not compromised. We then use laboratory experiments to confirm this finding. Finally we conclude that our lending protocol if implemented could improve social welfare by reducing transaction cost.
A multi-features based corner detection method

To improve the accuracy of corner's detection in the traditional black and white chessboard, a new method based on multi-features is proposed. Three distinct local features of the corners have been analyzed, they are structural response, symmetric response and edge response. By selectively applying these features, initial selection and later screening of potential corners have been done. Non-maximum suppression (NMS) has been used to generate original potential corner candidates, which could be scored by the combination of feature responses mentioned above. With all scores reasonably thresholded, false corners could be removed. Meanwhile, sub-pixel level of corner coordinates is achieved using the orthogonality of potential corners and adjacent pixels. Experimentally, final results prove the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method with high sub-pixel accuracy.
Fast buffering for optimizing worst slack and resource consumption in repeater trees

We present a very fast algorithm for buffering repeater trees. We scan a given preliminary topology in a bottom-up fashion and insert buffers and inverters, respecting the parities of the sinks. Information obtained by preprocessing allows for very fast decisions. To bound the number of shielding repeaters, they are only used where necessary to maximize the worst slack. Furthermore, instead of using a fixed set of repeater positions, they are computed on the fly based on the already buffered subtrees. Another key feature of our algorithm is that we modify the preliminary topology while buffering in order to avoid parallel wires or too many inverters. Experimental results on industrial designs illustrate the speed, quality, practicality, and flexibility of our procedure. In particular, we buffer about 100,000 repeater trees per minute and obtain results that are close to the theoretical optimum in several respects.
Simulations of egoistic and altruistic behaviors using the vidya multiagent system platform

This paper investigates the impacts of individual egoistic and altruistic behaviors in a virtual society built upon the Vidya game, used here as the social simulation and Multiagent System (MAS) platform. The Vidya game was adapted to support Jivas' (autonomous intelligent agents of the Vidya game) social behavior, including formation of reputations, creation of clans and "co"-action based on leadership. The evolving society of Jivas, using the above mentioned social behaviors, becomes an ordered and complex MAS. The experiments carried out demonstrate the impacts of individual altruistic and egoistic behaviors on society and emergence of social order through time as an important and desirable event in open MAS and societies.
Case exercises in an introduction to management course: a structured approach to increase student engagement

Research methodology Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to test the effectiveness of the case exercise process as it relates to increasing student participation and engagement. Surveys were used as a data collection method where students self-reported their participation. Case overview/synopsis This research paper argues that class engagement and participation is a process that must be learned by students. To this end, it presents a case exercise process designed particularly for the introduction to management class that helps students to learn and apply management theory while increasing their engagement. While each element of the process is not new, the integration of the elements into a process that is structured and repeated throughout the semester adds value to student participation. Empirical data demonstrated that students increased their participation in classes that used the case exercise process over traditional lecture classes. Complexity academic level This paper is relevant for faculty members seeking to use case exercises in teaching undergraduate management courses, particularly introductory management courses.
An 8 point DCT-II multiplierless architecture based on CMM

This paper presents an application of multiplication of variables by multiple constants, i.e., the Constant Matrix Multiplications (CMM) that use sharing of partial coefficients in DCT architecture. The use of CMM allows the change of the number of multipliers for addition/subtraction and shifting operations in the shift-add architectures, causing the reduction of area and delay. In this work, an analysis of the 8 point DCT II with 16 bit-width is performed. It was implemented with both multiplier and architecture optimized with CMM using hardware description Verilog language. The results obtained in the synthesis using the Synopsys Design Compiler, while targeting UMC 130nm CMOS technology, allows the observation of a reduction of 15% in area and 8% in power.