Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accumulation of Polyphosphate in Lactobacillus spp. and Its Involvement in Stress Resistance

ABSTRACT Polyphosphate (poly-P) is a polymer of phosphate residues synthesized and in some cases accumulated by microorganisms, where it plays crucial physiological roles such as the participation in the response to nutritional stringencies and environmental stresses. Poly-P metabolism has received little attention in Lactobacillus, a genus of lactic acid bacteria of relevance for food production and health of humans and animals. We show that among 34 strains of Lactobacillus, 18 of them accumulated intracellular poly-P granules, as revealed by specific staining and electron microscopy. Poly-P accumulation was generally dependent on the presence of elevated phosphate concentrations in the culture medium, and it correlated with the presence of polyphosphate kinase (ppk) genes in the genomes. The ppk gene from Lactobacillus displayed a genetic arrangement in which it was flanked by two genes encoding exopolyphosphatases of the Ppx-GppA family. The ppk functionality was corroborated by its disruption (LCABL_27820 gene) in Lactobacillus casei BL23 strain. The constructed ppk mutant showed a lack of intracellular poly-P granules and a drastic reduction in poly-P synthesis. Resistance to several stresses was tested in the ppk-disrupted strain, showing that it presented a diminished growth under high-salt or low-pH conditions and an increased sensitivity to oxidative stress. These results show that poly-P accumulation is a characteristic of some strains of lactobacilli and may thus play important roles in the physiology of these microorganisms.
How universal is happiness

There is a longstanding discussion on whether happiness is culturally relative or not. The following questions are addressed in that context: 1) Do we all assess how much we like our life? 2) Do we appraise our life on the same grounds? 3) Are the conditions for happiness similar for all of us? 4) Are the consequences of happiness similar in all cultures? 5) Do we all seek happiness? 6) Do we seek happiness in similar ways? 7) Do we enjoy life about equally much? The available data suggest that all humans tend to assess how much they like their life. The evaluation draws on affective experience, which is linked to gratification of universal human needs and on cognitive comparison which is framed by cultural standards of the good life. The overall appraisal seems to depend more on the former, than on the latter source of information. Conditions for happiness appear to be quite similar across the world and so are the consequences of enjoying life or not. There is more cultural variation in the valuation of happiness and in beliefs about conditions for happiness. The greatest variation is found in how happy people are.
Development of the student practice evaluation form revised edition package.

BACKGROUND/AIM This paper describes the development of the Student Practice Evaluation Form Revised Edition (SPEF-R) Package. This assessment tool was based on the Student Placement Evaluation Form (SPEF), which was used nationally to evaluate student performance on professional practice placements. METHODS The SPEF-R was developed using an action research process through three cycles of action and reflection: (1) national consultation through telephone interviews with participants from three stakeholder groups (10 academics, 28 practice educators and 18 students); (2) development of the SPEF-R Package; and (3) feedback on draft, piloting and launch. RESULTS In cycle 1, the most frequently identified strengths of the SPEF included its structure, comprehensiveness and clarity of expectations and utility in planning student placements. Overall, issues/concerns were less frequently identified and included length and the need for more training. In cycle 2, the SPEF-R package was developed, with key changes made to the SPEF and handbook in response to results and the enhancement of tools for providing feedback on placements and recording practice experience. Cycle 3 involved obtaining feedback on the draft, further revision and launching of the tool. DISCUSSION Action research is useful for addressing practice issues in higher education. The development of the SPEF-R was grounded in contemporary views regarding the provision of formative feedback and based on stakeholders' views. However, further research is required to evaluate its properties as an assessment design. In addition, a training website for professional practice educators was created and an electronic version of the SPEF-R is in development.
The relation between emotional intelligence and psychological capital of employees

This paper examines the relationship between the Emotional Intelligence (EI), understood as an individual’s competence in intelligent adaptive behavior, and the Psychological Capital (PC), seen as a set of positive personality features used in the professional scope, of employees. A quantitative survey was made with a sample of 301 individuals of both genders and different age groups that are currently employed in Portugal. We used the measures Emotional Intelligence Scale (Rego, Sousa Cunha, Correia, & Saur-Amaral, 2007) and the PsyCap Questionnaire (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007). The results suggest that the EI has a significant relationship and a high correlation (r = .599) with the PC of the workers, being the capacity of self motivate using the own feelings (selfencouragement) and to control their feelings in emotional situations (emotional self-control) factors that contribute very much to promote the Psychological Capital of the employees.
Fast texture and structure image reconstruction using the perceptual hash

This paper focuses on the fast texture and structure reconstruction of images. The proposed method, applied to images, consists of several steps. The first one deals with the extracted textural features of the input images based on the Law’s energy. The pixels around damaged image regions are clustered using these features, that allow to define the correspondence between pixels from different patches. Second, cubic spline curve is applied to reconstruct a structure and to connect edges and contours in the damaged area. The choice of the current pixel to be recovered is decided using the fast marching approach. The Telea method or modifications of the exemplar based method are used after this depending on the classification of the regions where to-be-restored pixel is located. In modification to quickly find patches we use the perceptual hash. Such a strategy allows to get some data structure containing the hashes of similar patches. This enables us to reduce the search procedure to the procedure for "calculations" of the patch. The proposed method is tested on various samples of images, with different geometrical features and compared with the state-of-the-art image inpainting methods; the proposed technique is shown to produce better results in reconstruction of missing small and large objects on test images.
Automatic annotation of COMMUNICATOR dialogue data for learning dialogue strategies and user simulations

We present and evaluate an automatic annotation system which builds “Information State Update” (ISU) representations of dialogue context for the COMMUNICATOR (2000 and 2001) corpora of humanmachine dialogues (approx 2300 dialogues). The purposes of this annotation are to generate training data for reinforcement learning (RL) of dialogue policies, to generate data for building user simulations, and to evaluate different dialogue strategies against a baseline. The automatic annotation system uses the DIPPER dialogue manager. This produces annotations of user inputs and dialogue context representations. We present a detailed example, and then evaluate our annotations, with respect to the task completion metrics of the original corpus. The resulting data has been used to train user simulations and to learn successful dialogue strategies.
CD4 Effector T Cell Subsets in the Response to Influenza

The immune response of naive CD4 T cells to influenza virus is initiated in the draining lymph nodes and spleen, and only after effectors are generated do antigen-specific cells migrate to the lung which is the site of infection. The effector cells generated in secondary organs appear as multiple subsets which are a heterogeneous continuum of cells in terms of number of cell divisions, phenotype and function. The effector cells that migrate to the lung constitute the more differentiated of the total responding population, characterized by many cell divisions, loss of CD62L, down-regulation of CCR7, stable expression of CD44 and CD49d, and transient expression of CCR5 and CD25. These cells also secrete high levels of interferon γ and reduced levels of interleukin 2 relative to those in the secondary lymphoid organs. The response declines rapidly in parallel with viral clearance, but a spectrum of resting cell subsets reflecting the pattern at the peak of response is retained, suggesting that heterogeneous effector populations may give rise to corresponding memory populations. These results reveal a complex response, not an all-or-none one, which results in multiple effector phenotypes and implies that effector cells and the memory cells derived from them can display a broad spectrum of functional potentials.
The Role of Parents in High-Achieving Schools Serving Low-Income, At-Risk Populations

This study investigates the critical elements of parent involvement as related to children's improved academic achievement. Survey data were collected from 220 parents whose children attend three Chicago public elementary schools. The schools serve largely minority, low-income populations and score in the top third of the Illinois State Achievement Tests. Using Epstein's framework of parent involvement, we found that participants indicated a stronger tendency to participate in two of Epstein's typologies: Type I (Parenting) and Type IV (Learning at Home). Results suggest that schools struggling with unsatisfactory student achievement may benefit from focusing parent involvement efforts on building parenting capacity and encouraging learning-at-home activities.
Social Distance Evaluation in Human Parietal Cortex

Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. “close friends” “high lord”). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space.
Qualitative distances and qualitative description of images for indoor scene description and recognition in robotics

This thesis is focused on reducing the gap between the acquisition of low-level information by robot sensors and the need of obtaining high-level information for enhancing human--machine communication and for applying logical reasoning processes. To this end, approaches for qualitative and semantic image description and qualitative distance sensor interpretation were developed. Experimentation was carried out on different robotic platforms showing useful applications.
Performance Evaluation of Vehicular DTN Routing under Realistic Mobility Models

In performance studies of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the underlying mobility model plays an important role. Since conventional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols do not work efficiently in vehicular environments due to the rapid topology changes, the Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) model is often applied. In this paper, we construct a new mobility model, the Shanghai Urban Vehicular Network (SUVnet) model by using the GPS data from more than 4,000 taxis we have collected, and then investigate the performance of two kinds of DTN routing, the non-geographic pure epidemic routing and our newly-proposed geographic DTN routing, the Distance-Aware Epidemic Routing (DAER). We use the popular random waypoint mobility model and a more complex microscopic traffic simulator generated model for performance comparison. With the two considered DTN routing protocols, conventional mobility models tend to give higher performance results than SUVnet model, the presumably more realistic mobility model.
An Examination of Personal Values and Value Systems of Chinese and U.S. Business Students.

Using the Rokeach Value Survey and the Musser and Orke typology this paper examines the personal values and value systems of business students in China and compares the results with the results of a recent study that used similar methodology to examine the values and value systems of U.S. students. The study also examines the differences in values and value systems of the Chinese students by gender and by major. While there are few differences for the Chinese students by gender, our findings show several differences in the rankings of values by the Chinese and U.S. students as well as differences in value systems. Implications for accounting education are discussed.
The Development of Public Perception Research in the Genomics Field

This article describes a meta-analysis that was conducted on the subjects of published academic research on the public perception of genomics. In total, 451 journal articles were analyzed, all published between 1970 and 2006 and sampled from the databases Web of Science and Scopus. Results indicate the increasing popularity of research on this topic in the last decade, which reflects the same curve as media coverage of the new technology. Many authors study the public perception of genomics, but only a small number are productive. There is a strong focus on food and agriculture genomics and a separate field of authors and journals for medical genomics. The authors make several recommendations for future developments in the public perception of genomics.
Non-contact inductive displacement-to-digital converter

A non-contact inductive voltage divider (IVD) type displacement transducer that directly provides a digital output proportional to the displacement of the non-contact (floating) wiper is presented here. The floating wiper IVD becomes an integral part of a suitably modified dual slope type digital converter (DSDC) and the logic of conversion ensures that the digital output of the DSDC is not affected by the changes in the distance between the floating wiper and the inductive element. Simulation and emulation studies have been carried out to establish the feasibility and functionality of the proposed method. Experimentation on a prototype non-contact inductive angular displacement sensor built in the laboratory further corroborates the efficacy of the proffered technique.
Linking Data and Learning: The Grow Network Study

During the last decade, standards, assessments, and accountability have emerged as three prongs of a national education reform movement that has asked district and school administrators to think very differently about educational decision making and the use of data. However, research about data-driven decision making is limited, especially concerning teachers. This article describes findings from a 2-year exploratory study that examined how educators within the New York City public school system are using data-made available to teachers through the print- and Web-based reporting systems of the Grow Network-to inform decisions about teaching and learning. In this article, we summarize what we learned about the specific ways in which teachers and administrators make use of the Grow Reports® to inform educational practices.
Generalized just-in-time trace compilation using a parallel task farm in a dynamic binary translator

Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) is the key technology behind cross-platform virtualization and allows software compiled for one Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to be executed on a processor supporting a different ISA. Under the hood, DBT is typically implemented using Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation of frequently executed program regions, also called traces. The main challenge is translating frequently executed program regions as fast as possible into highly efficient native code. As time for JIT compilation adds to the overall execution time, the JIT compiler is often decoupled and operates in a separate thread independent from the main simulation loop to reduce the overhead of JIT compilation. In this paper we present two innovative contributions. The first contribution is a generalized trace compilation approach that considers all frequently executed paths in a program for JIT compilation, as opposed to previous approaches where trace compilation is restricted to paths through loops. The second contribution reduces JIT compilation cost by compiling several hot traces in a concurrent task farm. Altogether we combine generalized light-weight tracing, large translation units, parallel JIT compilation and dynamic work scheduling to ensure timely and efficient processing of hot traces. We have evaluated our industry-strength, LLVM-based parallel DBT implementing the ARCompact ISA against three benchmark suites (EEMBC, BioPerf and SPEC CPU2006) and demonstrate speedups of up to 2.08 on a standard quad-core Intel Xeon machine. Across short- and long-running benchmarks our scheme is robust and never results in a slowdown. In fact, using four processors total execution time can be reduced by on average 11.5% over state-of-the-art decoupled, parallel (or asynchronous) JIT compilation.
Integrity of a HPV11 infection cell model and identification of (-)-Epigallocatechin-3-gallate as a potential HPV11 inhibitor

Background Condyloma acuminatum (CA) is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases and induced by low-risk human papillomaviruses (HPVs), mainly HPV type 6 and 11. Here, we report the identification of (-)-Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) by an HPV11 infection cell model. Results The recombined HPV11.HaCaT cells had stable HPV 11 early genes expression. The introducing of HPV11 genome significantly increased the proliferation of HPV11.HaCaT cells, as well as the proportion of cells in S and G2/M phases. After treated with rhIFN-α 2a, IFN signaling pathway was activated in both HaCaT and HPV11.HaCaT cells, while HPV11 decreased the activation level. In addition, rhIFN-α 2a, could inhibit expression of HPV 11 E6 and E7 mRNA significantly (P<0.05). However, cell growth and cell cycle did not show statistical difference (P>0.05). Nevertheless, EGCG, a major active constituent in tea polyphenol, showed strong anti-HPV11 effect, which inhibited HPV11 E6 and E7 mRNA. Methods Gene transfection technique was used to introduce HPV11 genome into HaCaT cells, named HPV11.HaCaT cells. With the established cell model, we explore the anti-HPV11 effect of (-)-Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) on cell growth, viability and affection on expression HPV11 E6 and E7 mRNA. Conclusion Our data collectively demonstrated that the recombinant HPV11.HaCaT cells were integral and practical to be a cell model to test anti-HPV11 agents and explore the interaction between HPV11 genes and host cells. And EGCG inhibits expression of HPV11 E6 and E7 mRNA in the recombinant HPV11.HaCaT cells.
Maternal mental health symptoms are positively related to emotional and restrained eating attitudes in a statewide sample of mothers participating in a supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and young children†

Postpartum, low-income mothers are at risk for mental health symptoms and obesity, and disordered eating attitudes may be associated with both mental health and obesity in this vulnerable population. The study objective is to determine whether higher levels of mental health symptoms are associated with increased odds of emotional and restrained eating attitudes in this sample of Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) participants. Data on 711 mothers of infants <13 months from a statewide sample of Maryland WIC participants were collected via telephone survey. Maternal mental health symptoms were measured on continuous scales for depression (PRIME-MD), stress (Perceived Stress Scale) and anxiety (Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). Emotional and restrained eating attitudes were measured with questions adapted from the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used. Obesity [body mass index (BMI) ≥ 30] was explored as a moderating variable. Mothers reporting higher levels of depression symptoms [odds ratio (OR) = 3.93, 95%CI: 2.71-5.69], anxiety symptoms (OR = 1.96, 95%CI: 1.47-2.65), stress symptoms (OR = 2.09, 95%CI: 1.67-2.61) and high overall mental health symptomatology (OR = 3.51, 95%CI: 2.43-5.3) had increased odds of emotional eating attitudes. There were significant associations between symptoms of depression (OR = 1.59, 95% CI: 1.12-2.25) and increased odds of restrained eating attitudes. Obesity did not moderate the association. Mothers with mental health symptoms are at risk for disordered eating attitudes, which may increase risk of poor diet. These findings underscore the need for greater focus on addressing maternal mental health status and eating attitudes in the postpartum period.
Interconnection Structures, Management and Routing Challenges in Cloud-Service Data Center Networks: A Survey

Today’s data center networks employ expensive networking equipments in associated structures that were not designed to meet the increasing requirements of the current large-scale data center services. Limitations that vary between reliability, resource utilization, and high costs are challenging. The era of cloud computing represents a promise to enable large-scale data centers. Computing platforms of such cloud service data centers consist of large number of commodity low-price servers that, with a theme of virtualization on top, can meet the performance of the expensive high-level servers at only a fraction of the price. Recently, the research in data center networks started to evolve rapidly. This opened the path for addressing many of its design and management challenges, these like scalability, reliability, bandwidth capacities, virtual machines’ migration, and cost. Bandwidth resource fragmentation limits the network agility, and leads to low utilization rates, not only for the bandwidth resources, but also for the servers that run the applications. With Traffic Engineering methods, managers of such networks can adapt for rapid changes in the network traffic among their servers, this can help to provide better resource utilization and lower costs. The market is going through exciting changes, and the need to run demanding-scale services drives the work toward cloud networks. These networks that are enabled by the notation of autonomic management, and the availability of commodity low-price network equipments. This work provides the readers with a survey that presents the management challenges, design and operational constraints of the cloud-service data center networks