Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using policy to promote participatory planning: an examination of Minnesota's Lake Improvement Districts from the citizen perspective

Increased development around Minnesota's lakes and their respective watersheds has degraded lake health in counties surrounding the St. Paul and Minneapolis metro areas. Confronted with the implications of degraded lakes, such as loss of property values and declining recreational experiences, lakefront landowners, and those using the lake for recreation, are increasingly looking for meaningful ways to engage in activities to improve lake water quality. Even with increased citizen interest in lake management issues, state and county agencies are struggling to find effective methods that transform citizen interest into citizen action. We examine the Minnesota Lake Improvement District (LID) Law as a mechanism for formally involving lakefront homeowners in the design and implementation of lake management actions from the citizen perspective. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews with LID participants were used to explore what citizens perceived tobe benefits and challenges of the programme. Findings provide insight to environmental planners regarding citizen perceptions of pursuing a participatory management approach in which citizens are able to request a new taxing district to fund their desired lake management activities.
Lack of CCR5 on dendritic cells promotes a proinflammatory environment in submandibular glands of the NOD mouse

Sjögren’s syndrome is an autoimmune disease characterized by lymphocytic infiltration of the salivary glands. In the NOD mouse, a model for this disease, the development of lymphocytic infiltrates in the salivary glands is preceded by an accumulation of dendritic cells (DC). Given the key importance of DC in regulating the immune response, we characterized the DC isolated from NOD salivary glands. These DC lacked membrane expression of CCR5, whereas DC from control salivary glands did express this molecule. The lack of expression was present already prior to the onset of lymphocytic infiltration, indicating that this was not the result of ongoing inflammation. DC from other sources in the NOD mouse also showed a decrease in CCR5 expression. The lack of CCR5 expression in the NOD salivary gland was accompanied by an increase in inflammatory chemokines. Furthermore, DC from CCR5−/− animals or DC treated with a CCR5 antagonist showed increased secretion of IL‐12. Interestingly, in Sjögren’s syndrome patients, CCR5 expression on circulating monocytes was decreased and correlated to increased levels of IL‐12. These data indicate that CCR5 has regulatory properties and that the lack of CCR5 in NOD DC contributes to the proinflammatory environment in the salivary glands.
Quantitative determination of Gd‐DTPA concentration in T1‐weighted MR renography studies

A method for calculating contrast agent concentration from MR signal intensity (SI) was developed and validated for T1‐weighted MR renography (MRR) studies. This method is based on reference measurements of SI and relaxation time T1 in a Gd‐DTPA‐doped water phantom. The same form of SI vs. T1 dependence was observed in human tissues. Contrast concentrations calculated by the proposed method showed no bias between 0 and 1 mM, and agreed better with the reference values derived from direct T1 measurements than the concentrations calculated using the relative signal method. Phantom‐based conversion was used to determine the contrast concentrations in kidney tissues of nine patients who underwent dynamic Gd‐DTPA‐enhanced 3D MRR at 1.5T and 99mTc‐DTPA radionuclide renography (RR). The concentrations of both contrast agents were found to be close in magnitude and showed similar uptake and washout behavior. As shown by Monte Carlo simulations, errors in concentration due to SI noise were below 10% for SNR = 20, while a 10% error in precontrast T1 values resulted in a 12–17% error for concentrations between 0.1 and 1 mM. The proposed method is expected to be particularly useful for assessing regions with highly concentrated contrast. Magn Reson Med 57:1012–1018, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Composable Secure Roaming Authentication Protocol for Cloud-assisted Body Sensor Networks

The cloud-assisted Body Sensor Networks (BSN) often has an architecture of Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWN) model, in which both the body sensors and the users must be secure to protect the whole infrastructure. Unfortunately, both the information providers and the users are movable and resource-constrained in communication and computation. Thus some new security problems are proposed, such as the light weight-secure authentication caused by limited resource, re-authentication in foreign zone caused by mobility, and composablilty security caused by heterogeneity between the transmission subnet, many BSN subnets. We propose a Random Roaming Authentication Protocol (RanRAP) for BSNs with these cloud-assisted infrastructure. We test the composable security at an AP/cluster head/gateway node by using strand spaces theory, and analyze the performance of RanRAP protocol in both the theoretical analysis and experiment simulations. It was shown that RanRAP has some advantages of composable security, computation and communication overheads over some related protocols.
Fuzzy Mathematical Machine as Fuzzy System

An enhanced name translation server, for use on a packet data network such as the Internet, executes a conditional analysis in response to at least some queries or requests for name translations. For example, the server may return a different destination address at different times or in response to translation requests from different terminals. The server also can query a primary destination terminal device, and condition the response to the calling terminal on the status of the primary terminal. For example, if the primary terminal is "live' the server forwards the address of that terminal to the calling terminal device to set up communications. Otherwise, the server returns alternate destination address information. The server also supports a wide variety of different types of translations, including domain name to address, domain name to telephone number, and telephone number to address. The enhanced translations offer called customers numerous options for controlling communications directed toward them, and the customers may elect to apply these options both to their data communications services and their voice communications services through the packet data network.
Sinusoidal input-based visual control for nonholonomic vehicles

SUMMARY This paper proposes a new visual control approach based on sinusoidal inputs to be used on a nonholonomic robot. We present several contributions: In our method, developed considering a unicycle kinematic model, sinusoids are used in such a way that the generated vehicle trajectories are feasible, smooth and versatile. Our technique improves previous sinusoidal-based control works in terms of efficiency and flexibility. As further contributions, we present analytical expressions for the evolution of the robot's state, and propose a new state-feedback control law based on these expressions. All the information used in the control scheme is obtained from omnidirectional vision by means of the one-dimensional trifocal tensor. Stability analysis of the proposed approach is presented, and its performance is illustrated through experiments.
Asynchronous exceptions in Haskell

Asynchronous exceptions, such as timeouts are important for robust, modular programs, but are extremely difficult to program with — so much so that most programming languages either heavily restrict them or ban them altogether. We extend our earlier work, in which we added synchronous exceptions to Haskell, to support asynchronous exceptions too. Our design introduces scoped combinators for blocking and unblocking asynchronous interrupts, along with a somewhat surprising semantics for operations that can suspend. Uniquely, we also give a formal semantics for our system.
What Causes a Neuron to Spike?

The computation performed by a neuron can be formulated as a combination of dimensional reduction in stimulus space and the nonlinearity inherent in a spiking output. White noise stimulus and reverse correlation (the spike-triggered average and spike-triggered covariance) are often used in experimental neuroscience to ask neurons which dimensions in stimulus space they are sensitive to and to characterize the nonlinearity of the response. In this article, we apply reverse correlation to the simplest model neuron with temporal dynamicsthe leaky integrate-andfire modeland find that for even this simple case, standard techniques do not recover the known neural computation. To overcome this, we develop novel reverse-correlation techniques by selectively analyzing only isolated spikes and taking explicit account of the extended silences that precede these isolated spikes. We discuss the implications of our methods to the characterization of neural adaptation. Although these methods are developed in the context of the leaky integrate-and-fire model, our findings are relevant for the analysis of spike trains from real neurons.
Mechanism of Nef‐induced CD4 endocytosis: Nef connects CD4 with the μ chain of adaptor complexes

The Nef protein of primate lentiviruses down‐regulates the cell surface expression of CD4 and probably MHC I by connecting these receptors with the endocytic machinery. Here, we reveal that Nef interacts with the μ chains of adaptor complexes, key components of clathrin‐coated pits. For human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV‐2) and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) Nef, this interaction occurs via tyrosine‐based motifs reminiscent of endocytosis signals. Mutating these motifs prevents the binding of SIV Nef to the μ chain of plasma membrane adaptor complexes, abrogates its ability to induce CD4 internalization, suppresses the accelerated endocytosis of a chimeric integral membrane protein harboring Nef as its cytoplasmic domain and confers a dominant‐negative phenotype to the viral protein. Taken together, these data identify μ adaptins as downstream mediators of the down‐modulation of CD4, and possibly MHC I, by Nef.
Assignments of 1 H and 15 N resonances of the bacteriophage λ capsid stabilizing protein gpD

The Escherichia coli bacteriophage λ virion is comprised of an icosahedral head and a long flexible non-contractile tail, and has been extensively studied as a model system for virus assembly (Hendrix et al., 1983; Dokland and Murialdo, 1993). Like all icosahedral dsDNA bacteriophages, the morphogenesis of bacteriophage λ proceeds through the assembly of an empty prohead, which is subsequently filled with DNA. The shell of the procapsid is composed mainly from gpE. DNA packaging is accompanied by expansion of the shell and binding of the 109 amino-acid protein gpD. The binding sites for gpD are created or exposed only after the prohead expands (Imber et al., 1980). gpD is not required for prohead assembly itself but is essential if a full-length genome is to be stably accommodated in the λ capsid. Thus, it is believed that gpD is necessary for stabilizing the capsid. In addition, Nand C-terminal fusion peptides and proteins of gpD have been used in λ phage display (Sternberg et al., 1995; Mikawa et al., 1996). The homo-trimeric structure of gpD in crystals has been determined and this structure is also present on the phage capsid, as observed by cryo-electron microscopy of empty capsids at 15 Å resolution (Yang et al., 2000). In the crystal structure, however, the functionally required N-terminal region is not defined. Interestingly, gpD exists stably as a monomer even at millimolar concentrations in solution in contrast with the crystal structure. The present NMR assignments will allow the detailed characterization of the ∗Present address: Department of Chemistry, University of Saskatchewan, 110 Science Place, Saskatoon S7N 5C9, Canada. ∗∗To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: guentert@gsc.riken. go.jp N-terminal region and provide a basis for further studies of the interaction between gpD and the phage λ capsid, and hence, for the understanding of the virion assembly process.
K-Join: Knowledge-Aware Similarity Join

Similarity join is a fundamental operation in data cleaning and integration. Existing similarity-join methods utilize the string similarity to quantify the relevance but neglect the knowledge behind the data, which plays an important role in understanding the data. Thanks to public knowledge bases, e.g., Freebase and Yago, we have an opportunity to use the knowledge to improve similarity join. To address this problem, we study knowledge-aware similarity join, which, given a knowledge hierarchy and two collections of objects (e.g., documents), finds all knowledge-aware similar object pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on knowledge-aware similarity join. There are two main challenges. The first is how to quantify the knowledge-aware similarity. The second is how to efficiently identify the similar pairs. To address these challenges, we first propose a new similarity metric to quantify the knowledge-aware similarity using the knowledge hierarchy. We then devise a filter-and-verification framework to efficiently identify the similar pairs. We propose effective signature-based filtering techniques to prune large numbers of dissimilar pairs and develop efficient verification algorithms to verify the candidates that are not pruned in the filter step. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms baseline algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.
INFLUENCE REMINISCENCE THERAPY ON QUALITY OF LIFE PATIENTS IN THE LONG-TERM HOSPITAL

Aim: The aim of the research was to identify and describe the quality of life of the elderly admitted to the Long Term Care Institution (LTCI) of Municipal Hospital of Ostrava (OCH) and compare it with the population norm. Furthermore, to evaluate the influence of reminiscence on their quality of life, cognitive function, and the presence of depressive symptoms. And to recognize the importance of reminiscence in the provision of nursing care for the elderly in a health care facility. Methods: The research sample consisted of 41 patients older than 60 who were admitted to the LTCI with reduced cognitive function, MMSE test results of 24 or less and who had signed an informed consent form. The method chosen was quantitative research using standardized measuring instruments used in geriatrics, namely the WHOQOL-BREF, WHOQOL-OLD, AAQ, MMSE and GDS questionnaires. These questionnaires were used before and after intervention. The reminiscence intervention therapy was carried out in groups of 5-10 participants once a week for 6-8 weeks and had a narrative character. Results: The elderly in the LTCI had slightly reduced quality of life in terms of independence and social participation. In other areas of life which were measured by the standardized WHOQOL-BREF and WHOQOL-OLD questionnaires quality of life was determined as within the interval of the population norm. It was found that reminiscence had a positive effect on quality of life in the domains of physical health, mental health, and also on the state of cognitive functions and the presence of depression. Conclusion: Reminiscence is an inexpensive non-pharmacological intervention, which has contributed to improving quality of life, cognitive function and a reduction in depression among the elderly hospitalized at the LTCI. Reminiscence work should become an example of good practice at every health-care facility which provides nursing care for the elderly and dementia sufferers.
Validation Study on Jason-2 Rain Flag and Rain Rate Estimation Over North Indian Ocean

This letter reports the results of the validation study on Jason-2 (JA2) rain flag and rain rate (RR) estimation over North Indian Ocean for the first time. This study was performed using 12 months of Geophysical Data Record (GDR) and collocated Microwave Imager and Precipitation Radar (PR) observations onboard Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) employing strict spatial and temporal collocation criteria. The present study brought out that rain flag parameter available in GDR was not triggered during rain events, and an attempt is made to recompute the same using a novel method of differential attenuation between Ku band and C band backscatter. The score of rain detection using recomputed Ku/C mean rain-free relation is found to be about 98%. The high rain detection by JA2 clearly demonstrates the performance of the dual-frequency rain flagging while considering the high temporal and spatial variability of the rain. The comparison of RR estimated from JA2 with TRMM sensors was in good agreement. The results of the present study thus accentuate the need for better rain flagging over regional oceans which is essential to evade erroneous values in altimetric geophysical parameters.
Reference in Dialogues and Shared Belief Revision

We shall show how to treat shared belief revision and reference management in the process of dialogues by distinguishing three types of discourse referents: (standard) discourse referents, shared discourse referents, and the shared belief referent, using an extended version of Discourse Representation Theory, called Hyper-DRS, which can represent shared beliefs semantically in a notation based on hyper-sets (sets in non-well-founded set theory).
High-performance architecture for dynamically updatable packet classification on FPGA

Algorithms and FPGA based implementations for packet classification have been studied over the past decade. Algorithmic solutions have focused on high throughput; however, supporting dynamic updates has been challenging. In this paper, we present a 2-dimensional pipelined architecture for packet classification on FPGA, which achieves high throughput while supporting dynamic updates. Fine grained processing elements are arranged in a 2-dimensional array; each processing element accesses its designated memory locally, resulting in a scalable architecture. The entire array is both horizontally and vertically pipelined. As a result, it supports high clock rate that does not deteriorate as the length of the packet header or the size of the rule set increases. The performance of the architecture does not depend on rule set features such as the number of unique values in each field. The architecture also efficiently supports range searches in individual fields. The total memory is proportional to the rule set size. Dynamic updates- modify, delete and insert operations for the rule set during run-time are also supported on the self-reconfigurable processing elements with very little impact on the sustained throughput. Experimental results show that, for a 1K 15-tuple rule set, a state-of-the-art FPGA can sustain 190Gbps throughput with 1million updates/second. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any packet classification approach that simultaneously supports both high throughput and dynamic updates of the rule set. Our architecture demonstrates 4× energy efficiency while achieving 2× throughput compared to TCAM.
The development and distribution of the interstitial cells of Cajal in the intestine of the equine fetus and neonate

This study set out to determine the pattern of development and distribution of the interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) in the intestinal tract of the equine fetus and neonate. Intestinal tissue samples from 12 naturally aborted equine fetuses and three euthanized neonates were collected and fixed in formalin prior to applying standard immunohistochemical labelling techniques targeting the c‐Kit protein of the ICC. At 6 months of gestation, a network of ICC was present in the myenteric plexus region of both the small and the large intestine. ICC were also present within the circular muscle layer. In the large intestine, a proximal to distal gradient of distribution was evident, with few ICC observed in the more distal parts of the large intestine in the younger fetuses compared with the near‐term animals. A transmural gradient of distribution was also evident within the large intestine, with the most luminal part of the muscularis externa being the last area to be colonized by ICC. This region did not appear fully developed until the early neonatal period. An increased density of ICC was noted throughout the large intestine in the regions of the taenial bands in all animals. This study is the first to describe ICC development and distribution in the equine fetus and neonate.
The WURDE Robotics Middleware and RIDE Multi-Robot Tele-Operation Interface

We have developed highly modular middleware for robotics programming and an interface for multi-robot teleoperation. WURDE provides abstractions for the communications, applications, and systems levels of robotic system development, which helps to isolate the developer from details not essential to the immediate task. RIDE is a control interface inspired by real time strategy games for tasking multiple robots at the same time, which increases the situational awareness of the operator and allows a single person to control many more robots than with single-robot interfaces. In this paper, we describe WURDE and RIDE and discuss how they were used in the 2006 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition.
Fisher Lecture: Dimension Reduction in Regression

Beginning with a discussion of R. A. Fisher's early written remarks that relate to dimension reduction, this article revisits principal components as a reductive method in regression, develops several model-based extensions and ends with descriptions of general approaches to model-based and model-free dimension reduction in regression. It is argued that the role for principal components and related methodology may be broader than previously seen and that the common practice of conditioning on observed values of the predictors may unnecessarily limit the choice of regression methodology.
Cleavage of Hemagglutinin-Bearing Lentiviral Pseudotypes and Their Use in the Study of Influenza Virus Persistence

Influenza A viruses (IAVs) are a major cause of infectious respiratory human diseases and their transmission is dependent upon the environment. However, the role of environmental factors on IAV survival outside the host still raises many questions. In this study, we used lentiviral pseudotypes to study the influence of the hemagglutinin protein in IAV survival. High-titered and cleaved influenza-based lentiviral pseudoparticles, through the use of a combination of two proteases (HAT and TMPRSS2) were produced. Pseudoparticles bearing hemagglutinin proteins derived from different H1N1, H3N2 and H5N1 IAV strains were subjected to various environmental parameters over time and tested for viability through single-cycle infectivity assays. We showed that pseudotypes with different HAs have different persistence profiles in water as previously shown with IAVs. Our results also showed that pseudotypes derived from H1N1 pandemic virus survived longer than those derived from seasonal H1N1 virus from 1999, at high temperature and salinity, as previously shown with their viral counterparts. Similarly, increasing temperature and salinity had a negative effect on the survival of the H3N2 and H5N1 pseudotypes. These results showed that pseudotypes with the same lentiviral core, but which differ in their surface glycoproteins, survived differently outside the host, suggesting a role for the HA in virus stability.