Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluent on Microbial Function and Community Structure in the Sediment of a Freshwater Stream with Variable Seasonal Flow

ABSTRACT We investigated the effects of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) discharge on the ecology of bacterial communities in the sediment of a small, low-gradient stream in South Australia. The quantification of genes involved in the biogeochemical cycling of carbon and nitrogen was used to assess potential impacts on ecosystem functions. The effects of disturbance on bacterial community structure were assessed by PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis of 16S rRNA genes, and clone library analysis was used to phylogenetically characterize significant shifts. Significant (P < 0.05) shifts in bacterial community structures were associated with alteration of the sediment's physicochemical properties, particularly nutrient loading from the WWTP discharge. The effects were greatest at the sampling location 400 m downstream of the outfall where the stream flow is reduced. This highly affected stretch of sediment contained representatives of the gammaproteobacteria that were absent from less-disturbed sites, including Oceanospirillales and Methylococcaceae. 16S rRNA gene sequences from less-disturbed sites had representatives of the Caulobacteraceae, Sphingomonadaceae, and Nitrospirae which were not represented in samples from disturbed sediment. The diversity was lowest at the reference site; it increased with proximity to the WWTP outfall and declined toward highly disturbed (400 m downstream) sites (P < 0.05). The potential for biological transformations of N varied significantly with the stream sediment location (P < 0.05). The abundance of amoA, narG, and nifH genes increased with the distance downstream of the outfall. These processes are driven by N and C availability, as well as redox conditions. Together these data suggest cause and effect between nutrient loading into the creek, shift in bacterial communities through habitat change, and alteration of capacity for biogeochemical cycling of N.
Time-Aware Entity Linking

Entity Linking is the task of automatically identifying entity mentions in a piece of text and linking them to their corresponding entries in a reference knowledge base like Wikipedia. Although there is a plethora of works on entity linking, existing state-of-the-art approaches do not explicitly consider the time aspect and specifically the temporality of an entity’s prior probability (popularity) and embedding (semantic network). Consequently, they show limited performance in annotating old documents like news or web archives, while the problem is bigger in cases of short texts with limited context, such as archives of social media posts and query logs. This thesis focuses on this problem and proposes a modeling that leverages time-aware prior probabilities and word embeddings in the entity linking task.
Revisiting network support for RDMA

The advent of RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) has led to a significant increase in the use of RDMA in datacenter networks. To achieve good performance, RoCE requires a lossless network which is in turn achieved by enabling Priority Flow Control (PFC) within the network. However, PFC brings with it a host of problems such as head-of-the-line blocking, congestion spreading, and occasional deadlocks. Rather than seek to fix these issues, we instead ask: is PFC fundamentally required to support RDMA over Ethernet? We show that the need for PFC is an artifact of current RoCE NIC designs rather than a fundamental requirement. We propose an improved RoCE NIC (IRN) design that makes a few simple changes to the RoCE NIC for better handling of packet losses. We show that IRN (without PFC) outperforms RoCE (with PFC) by 6-83% for typical network scenarios. Thus not only does IRN eliminate the need for PFC, it improves performance in the process! We further show that the changes that IRN introduces can be implemented with modest overheads of about 3-10% to NIC resources. Based on our results, we argue that research and industry should rethink the current trajectory of network support for RDMA.
An autonomous method on tracking stream data cluster evolution

Stream data can often show abrupt changes over time. It is very critical to analyze and predict the trends autonomously on time in the continuous, high speed and variable stream data environment. In this paper, we discuss the Autonomous Real-time Clustering Evolution Tracking algorithm which integrate the fractal cluster technique, self-adaptive sampling technique with the restriction of computing resource and the requirement of processing speed, and can discriminate the cluster evolution of stream data on time autonomously. Our performance experiments over a number of real and synthetic data sets illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency provided by our approach.
The In Vitro Degradation of Peacock Feathers by Some Fungi/ Der in‐vitro‐Abbau von Pfauenfedern durch einige Pilze

Summary: The breakdown of peacock feathers by 20 fungi is studied and characterized by the release of protein and keratinase activity. All the fungi except Aspergillus quercinus and Chaetomium globosum released protein in the medium. Maximum keratinase activity is measured in Gliocladium roseum. The degradation of feathers and existence of extracellular keratinase in these fungi is presented here for the first time.
Leveraging institutional data to understand student perceptions of teaching in large engineering classes

A global push to pursue careers in engineering has led to an increase in enrollment in engineering programs. However, rising student populations have led institutions to make compromises in order to effectively manage existing resources and rising costs, such as resorting to large classes despite evidence that they may be detrimental to student learning. Recognizing that large classes are both a necessity for institutions and a challenge for the instructors who teach them, we seek ways to help faculty create effective learning environments despite the difficulties posed by this setting. Developing an effective learning environment requires instructors to reflect and consider input from various sources, including students. A source of data for student input are student perceptions of teaching surveys. This paper used the MUSIC Model of Academic Motivation as basis to characterize qualitative data from student surveys with respect to two of the five MUSIC dimensions: Success and Caring. We allowed categorical variables to emerge from qualitative data and investigated how quantitative results from the student evaluation (e.g., Did the instructor present the material clearly? ) varied across categories. The manually-analyzed text data were also used to explore text analytics as a qualitative analysis technique for course evaluation surveys.
A Conceptual Framework to Enable the Changes Required for a One-Planet Future

We conceptualise a framework that incorporates psychological and non-psychological factors influencing pro-environmental behaviour. We conducted qualitative investigations in five sectors in South Africa, where individuals and groups are dealing with significant environmental issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and land-use change. We found three fundamental elements necessary for behavioural change to be realised: awareness (A) is defined as an understanding that society and earth systems are connected; motivation (M) involves the personal and operational drivers that encourage an individual or organisation to respond to new levels of awareness; and pathways (P) recognise the practical solutions and opportunities that facilitate actual change. AMP was built up from thirty-eight variables that cut across between three and five of the case studies, which were further grouped into fourteen categories. The inter-connectedness of AMP suggests that for pro-environmental behaviour to occur, attention cannot be focused on satisfying one of the elements in isolation. This is the first attempt to integrate theory from social psychology, sociology, organisational theory and management in a conceptual framework for pro-environmental behaviour. The AMP framework is useful for supporting practitioners or change-agents designing environmental sustainability initiatives.
Embedded error compensation for energy efficient DSP systems

Algorithmic noise-tolerance (ANT) is an effective statistical error compensation (SEC) technique for designing energy-efficient digital signal processing systems. A conventional ANT system employs an explicit estimator block to compensate for the large magnitude errors in the main block. The estimator presents area and power overheads, as large as 40% of the main block, to the system. In this paper, we propose ARCH-ANT, an architectural level embedded algorithmic noise-tolerance technique. ARCH-ANT achieves the same error compensation functionality as the conventional ANT by embedding the estimator block into the main block. Such embedding eliminates the estimator block and thus improves the system energy efficiency. A general optimization framework is proposed to design ARCH-ANT systems. Simulation results show that when applied to a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, 15.9%~69.4% and 59.2%-72.75% energy savings can be achieved by an 8 ×8 and 16 × 16 ARCH-ANT system, which is 5%~21.6% more than that of conventional ANT system, with no increase in mean square error (MSE).
Erratum: Noncanonical roles of membranous lysyl-tRNA synthetase in transducing cell-substrate signaling for invasive dissemination of colon cancer spheroids in 3D collagen I gels

The adhesion properties of cells are involved in tumor metastasis. Although KRS at the plasma membrane is shown important for cancer metastasis, additionally to canonical roles of cytosolic KRS in protein translation, how KRS and its downstream effectors promote the metastatic migration remains unexplored. Disseminative behaviors (an earlier metastatic process) of colon cancer cell spheroids embedded in 3D collagen gels were studied with regards to cell adhesion properties, and relevance in KRS-/+ knocked-down animal and clinical colon cancer tissues. Time-lapse imaging revealed KRS-dependent cell dissemination from the spheroids, whereas KRSsuppressed spheroids remained static due to the absence of outbound movements supported by cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) adhesion. While keeping E-cadherin at the outward disseminative cells, KRS caused integrin-involved intracellular signaling for ERK/c-Jun, paxillin, and cell-ECM adhesion-mediated signaling to modulate traction force for crawling movement. KRS-suppressed spheroids became disseminative following ERK or paxillin re-expression. The KRS-dependent intracellular signaling activities correlated with the invasiveness in clinical colon tumor tissues and in KRS/+ knocked-down mice tissues. Collectively, these observations indicate that KRS at the plasma membrane plays new roles in metastatic migration as a signaling inducer, and causes intracellular signaling for cancer dissemination, involving cell-cell and cell-ECM adhesion, during KRS-mediated metastasis.
Service Commitment Strategies in Allocating Services to Applications

In this paper, the problem of commitment in allocating services to different applications and business processes is introduced. We model the problem based on the assumption that the services' instances are not put on hold throughout the lifetime of an application or a business process. Our objective is to find an optimal policy for committing services' instances to different applications to maximize the utilization of available instances of services. We formulate this problem and propose a Markov decision process approach for it. We present the optimal solution for a sample case with two types of services and two classes of application, and compare the performance of this optimal policy with a system with a full commitment policy as well as a No commitment policy system. The comparison results show that the policy obtained outperforms the other two policies. We also evaluate the performance of a system considering beta distribution for the service execution time, and we illustrate the effectiveness of applying the obtained policy on this system as well.
Electric Power Allocation in a Network of Fast Charging Stations

In order to increase the penetration of electric vehicles, a network of fast charging stations that can provide drivers with a certain level of quality of service (QoS) is needed. However, given the strain that such a network can exert on the power grid, and the mobility of loads represented by electric vehicles, operating it efficiently is a challenging and complex problem. In this paper, we examine a network of charging stations equipped with an energy storage device and propose a scheme that allocates power to them from the grid, as well as routes customers. We examine three scenarios, gradually increasing their complexity. In the first one, all stations have identical charging capabilities and energy storage devices, draw constant power from the grid and no routing decisions of customers are considered. It represents the current state of affairs and serves as a baseline for evaluating the performance of the proposed scheme. In the second scenario, power to the stations is allocated in an optimal manner from the grid and in addition a certain percentage of customers can be routed to nearby stations. In the final scenario, optimal allocation of both power from the grid and customers to stations is considered. The three scenarios are evaluated using real traffic traces corresponding to weekday rush hour from a large metropolitan area in the US. The results indicate that the proposed scheme offers substantial improvements of performance compared to the current mode of operation; namely, more customers can be served with the same amount of power, thus enabling the station operators to increase their profitability. Further, the scheme provides guarantees to customers in terms of the probability of being blocked (and hence not served) by the closest charging station to their location. Overall, the paper addresses key issues related to the efficient operation, both from the perspective of the power grid and the drivers satisfaction, of a network of charging stations.
Max-cover in map-reduce

The NP-hard Max-k-cover problem requires selecting k sets from a collection so as to maximize the size of the union. This classic problem occurs commonly in many settings in web search and advertising. For moderately-sized instances, a greedy algorithm gives an approximation of (1-1/e). However, the greedy algorithm requires updating scores of arbitrary elements after each step, and hence becomes intractable for large datasets. We give the first max cover algorithm designed for today's large-scale commodity clusters. Our algorithm has provably almost the same approximation as greedy, but runs much faster. Furthermore, it can be easily expressed in the MapReduce programming paradigm, and requires only polylogarithmically many passes over the data. Our experiments on five large problem instances show that our algorithm is practical and can achieve good speedups compared to the sequential greedy algorithm.
Expression of RUNX3 protein in human lung adenocarcinoma: Implications for tumor progression and prognosis

Runt‐related transcription factor 3 belongs to the runt domain family of transcription factors that play a pivotal role during normal tissue development and tumorigenesis in several organs. We directed our attention to the expression of RUNX3 protein in human lung AC and non‐neoplastic lung tissues, comparing the results with clinicopathological profiles. We evaluated the expression of RUNX3 protein in 17 pairs of lung AC and non‐neoplastic lung tissue. Furthermore, 98 lung AC were studied to examine the frequency of RUNX3‐positive cells. Western blot analysis showed a single band at 45 kDa in all 17 AC and non‐neoplastic tissues. Immunohistochemistry revealed immunoreactivity in alveolar type II pneumocytes or Clara cells. RUNX3 was expressed more frequently in the carcinomas with a BAC component than in those without (P < 0.01). Lower RUNX3 levels were associated with poorly differentiated types (P = 0.049). The five‐year survival rate was significantly higher in the 50 patients with higher levels of RUNX3 expression than in the 48 patients with lower levels (P = 0.027). The expression of RUNX3 protein in lung AC might play a pivotal role in tumor progression and patients’ survival. (Cancer Sci 2005; 96: 227–231)
Evolutionary relationship between the TonB-dependent outer membrane transport proteins: nucleotide and amino acid sequences of the Escherichia coli colicin I receptor gene

The nucleotide sequence of the Escherichia coli colicin I receptor gene (cir) has been determined. The predicted mature protein consists of 599 amino acids and has a molecular weight of 67,169. Several previously noted characteristics of other E. coli outer membrane protein sequences were also identified in the sequence of Cir. These include an overall acidic nature, the absence of long hydrophobic stretches of amino acids, and a lack of predicted alpha-helical secondary structure. Because two classes of outer membrane proteins (the TonB-dependent transport proteins and the porins) share some structural features, protein sequences from both of these groups were aligned pairwise and scored for sequence similarity. Statistical evidence suggested that the porins were not related to the proteins in the TonB-dependent group; however, there was a significant relationship between the proteins in the TonB-dependent group. On the basis of the multiple progressive sequence alignment and the similarity scores derived from it, a tree representing evolutionary distance between five TonB-dependent outer membrane transport proteins was generated.
Gender Affirmation and Resiliency Among Black Transgender Women With and Without HIV Infection

Abstract Purpose: Among black transgender women (transwomen) at high risk of HIV acquisition or already living with HIV/AIDS, the study examined whether medical or socially based gender affirming factors may contribute differentially to selected measures of resiliency, perceived stress, and a scale measure of mental health outcomes. This question has implications for clinical care and counseling of this population. Methods: Seventy-seven black transwomen were recruited to participate in a private, face-to-face structured interview. Two index measures of gender affirmation (GA) were constructed from the data. One comprised medical aspects only and the other comprised social aspects of GA. Assessed outcomes were personal competence and acceptance of self and life (resiliency), perceived stress and recent anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation (mental health). Associations between GA variables and outcomes were first assessed using bivariate level correlations. Significant bivariate associations were then tested in multivariable regression models adjusting for age and HIV status. Results: Mean age of the sample was 34.5 years. More than one-half of the sample (62.3%) indicated being HIV-infected. None of the bivariate or multivariable associations pertaining to GA medical factors were significant. Conversely, the social GA factors were significant and protective with all four outcomes. In the presence of age and HIV status, greater social GA was significantly associated with greater personal competence, acceptance of self and life, and positive mental health outcome. HIV status had an independent effect on personal competence, acceptance of self and life, with HIV-positive transwomen scoring higher on both measures. Conclusion: Among black transwomen at high risk of HIV acquisition or already HIV-infected, study findings suggest the possibility that socially based GA may play a prominent role in strengthening the resiliency and mental health of black transwomen. This same protective effect may not occur as a consequence of gender affirming body modification practices.
ARMAR-an anthropomorphic arm for humanoid service robot

Service robots which should perform human-like operations will penetrate into a great number of applications in the future. Requirements for this is high flexibility, autonomy and the ability to adapt to new situations. The paper describes a design concept and a prototype implementation of an autonomous mobile humanoid service robot, which should mainly support people in their daily life as a personal or an assistance robot. The state of the research is that the general concept is developed and two anthropomorphic arms are built up. In the article the sensor system and the control architecture of the anthropomorphic robot are described. To evaluate the performance and motion abilities of the anthropomorphic arm the human arm kinematics and properties are discussed.
Argument Inference from Relevant Event Mentions in Chinese Argument Extraction

As a paratactic language, sentence-level argument extraction in Chinese suffers much from the frequent occurrence of ellipsis with regard to inter-sentence arguments. To resolve such problem, this paper proposes a novel global argument inference model to explore specific relationships, such as Coreference, Sequence and Parallel, among relevant event mentions to recover those intersentence arguments in the sentence, discourse and document layers which represent the cohesion of an event or a topic. Evaluation on the ACE 2005 Chinese corpus justifies the effectiveness of our global argument inference model over a state-of-the-art baseline.
Genre, task, topic and time: facets of personal digital document management

Most operating systems provide the ability to create folders to contain documents, and to nest these folders to create a hierarchical organization. However, little is known about the kinds of folders people create using this type of organizing scheme, or how they structure those folders.Exploratory research was conducted, analyzing the folder structures of six knowledge workers and it was found that most folder names represent the genre, task, topic or time dimension of the documents they contained. While these four dimensions were consistent across all participants, the order in which these dimensions are combined into a hierarchical structure varies substantially, even among people with the same job.A number of interesting areas of investigation are highlighted for future research, including a proposal that these dimensions be treated as facets of document metadata and that exploring faceted navigation interfaces for personal digital document management would be a fruitful area for further research.
[A low level of TNF-mediates hemorrhage-induced acute lung injury via p55 TNF receptor].

OBJECTIVE To examine the temporal relationship of pulmonary TNF-alpha production to acute lung injury (ALI) during hemorrhagic shock (HS). METHODS HS was induced in mice by removal of 30% of calculated total blood volume. Lung TNF-alpha was measured by ELISA. Lung neutrophil accumulation was detected by immunofluorescent staining, and pulmonary microvascular permeability was assessed using Evans blue dye. RESULTS While HS induced a slight and transient increase in lung TNF-alpha, neutrophil accumulation preceded the change in lung TNF-alpha. However, lung neutrophil accumulation and the increase in microvascular permeability were abrogated in TNF-alpha knockout mice, and both were restored by administration of low dose TNF-alpha to TNF-alpha knockout mice prior to HS. Both neutrophil accumulation and microvascular leak were abrogated in p55 TNF-alpha receptor knockout mice, while p75 TNF-alpha receptor knockout mice behaved similar to wild type. CONCLUSION A low level of pulmonary TNF-alpha is sufficient to mediate HS-induced acute lung injury and that the p55 TNF-alpha receptor plays a dominant role in regulating the pulmonary inflammatory response to HS. The results suggest that anti-TNF-alpha strategies for the control of the pulmonary inflammatory response to HS can be directed toward antagonizing the p55 TNF-alpha receptor.