Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acylhydrazide and Isatin Schiff Bases as Alternate UV-Laser Desorption Ionization (LDI) Matrices for Low Molecular Weight (LMW) Peptides Analysis

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) is a preferred and widely used mass spectrometric technique for the analysis of macromolecules. Limited UV-LDI matrices are available for the analysis of biomolecules due to the restricted structural features to serve in the laser desorption/ionization mechanism with a problem of background signals appearing in the low mass region. This paper describes the application of Schiff base derivatives of acylhydrazide and isatin as alternate UV-LDI matrices for the analysis of peptides with significantly low background signals. Thirty one compounds have been successfully employed as matrices for the analysis of low molecular weight (LMW) peptides (α-Cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic acid (HCCA), a preferred choice for peptide analysis.
Synergistic Effects of IL-4 and IL-18 on IL-12-Dependent IFN-γ Production by Dendritic Cells1

Mouse splenic dendritic cells (DCs) produce IFN-γ in response to IL-12. In the present study, we analyzed effects of Th1 and Th2 cytokines on IFN-γ production by DCs. IL-18 produced by DCs and macrophages acts in an autocrine manner and augments IL-12-induced IFN-γ production by DCs as also observed in T and NK cells. Surprisingly, IL-4, a Th2 cytokine, also acts synergistically with IL-12 on IFN-γ production by DCs. In addition, IL-4 markedly enhances IFN-γ production when DCs are stimulated through CD40 or MHC class II. These results indicate that both Th1 and Th2 cytokines act on DCs during T cell-DC interaction upon Ag presentation. p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase is constitutively activated in mature DCs and is required for IFN-γ production by DCs. IL-18 but not IL-4 or IL-12 further activates the p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase activity, suggesting that IL-4 and IL-18 enhance IFN-γ production through distinct intracellular signal transduction pathways in DCs.
Combining Appearance-based and Model-based Methods for Real-Time Object Recognition and 6D Localization

A general solution for image-based object recognition and localization is still a goal far away. Therefore, the only way to tackle the problem is to apply the suitable approach for each specific problem. The most common techniques can be classified into global appearance-based, model-based, or histogram-based approaches, and approaches based on local features. In this paper, we concentrate on recognition and full 6D localization of solid colored objects of any geometry for real-time application on a humanoid robot system. State-of-the-art model-based methods can only deal with object geometries which can be broken down into 3D lines and planes, and thus can be efficiently projected into the image plane, which is not the case for most objects in a realistic scenario. In contrast, appearance-based methods have the power to be applicable for any object geometry, but are rarely combined with full 6D localization of objects, which is required for any realistic application in the context of grasping with a humanoid robot. We present a system which combines the benefits of global appearance-based and model-based approaches, resulting in a system which can acquire object representations automatically given its 3D model, and can recognize and localize solid-colored objects in 6D in an arbitrary scene in real-time
Optimising virtual team leadership in global software development

The globalisation of the software development industry has solved one set of problems and created a new set. Skills shortages in the host organisation can be solved by Global Software Development, yet the effective management of virtual teams is a new challenge. This study proposes a process reference model (PRM) and assessment model for the leadership of project teams, including complex virtual teams. Using modelling techniques from Software Engineering, the Leadership PRM describes the attributes that a project manager should possess, and the activities they should perform if they are to be perceived by those around them as leaders. The developed model contains the essential leadership characteristics. Leadership is difficult to define since it is situationally expressed. The context determines the outward form that leadership takes in a given situation. A manager who innately embodies these essential leadership qualities will be perceived as a leader by those around them. Leadership is a skill that can be learned and developed over time to a higher level of competence. Managers coordinate the activities of team members in the pursuit of goals, while leaders extend this management capability by knowing how to motivate team members to want to do what it is the leader wants them to do.
Modeling and Analysis for Cache-Enabled Cognitive D2D Communications in Cellular Networks

Exploiting cognition to the cache-enabled device-to- device (D2D) communication underlaying the multi- channel cellular network is the main focus of this paper. D2D pairs perform direct communications via sensing the available cellular channels, bypassing the base station (BS). Dynamic service is considered and the network performance is evaluated with the stochastic geometry. Node locations are first modeled as mutually independent Poisson Point Processes, and the service queueing process is formulated. Then the corresponding tier association and cognitive access protocol are developed. The delay and the length for the queue at the BS and D2D transmitter are further elaborated, with modeling the traffic dynamics of request arrivals and departures as the discrete-time multiserver queue with priorities. Moreover, impacts of the physical layer and content-centric features on the system performance are jointly investigated to provide a valuable insight.
Can a paper-based sketching interface improve the gamer experience in strategy computer games?

The field of sketching interface design in regards to video game is relatively young and has not been investigated in great depth. Freepad is a custom paper-based MIDI musical interface. We describe an extension to Freepad that supports user customization for real time strategy games. Using only a webcam, a pen and a sheet of paper, players can design their own interface by drawing shapes and linking them to simple or complex actions in the game. In an user study, we use this extended Freepad to explore the potential of sketching interfaces in strategy video games. Our results indicate that using Freepad improves the efficiency of players and their enjoyment in this kind of games.
Enforcing Primary Key Requirements in Multilevel Relations

Polyinstantiation comes in several di erent avors [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. There are signi cant di erences between these approaches and debate continues about the correct de nition of polyinstantiation and its operational semantics. However, in each case polyinstantiation fails to preserve the basic requirement of a primary key that there be one and only one tuple per primary key value in a relation. Polyinstantiation forces a relation to contain multiple tuples with the same primary key, distinguishable by their classi cations or by non-primary key attribute values.
The Manifold Nature of Vowel Sounds by Aren Jansen Master ’ s Paper

Recently there has been great interest in geometrically motivated approaches to data analysis and pattern recognition. Low-dimensional structure in higher-dimensional data can be exploited by manifold-based data reduction and learning algorithms to improve performance. The existence of such a structure in speech has not been formally documented. Toward this end, I present a derivation of the approximate discrete spectra of sustained vowel phonemes using standard tube models of the vocal tract. Adopting a geometrical approach, each N -point discrete frequency spectrum produced using these models represents a point in R . Given a continuous range of vocal tract model parameters, I either formally or graphically demonstrate that the subsets of Euclidean space traced out by the resulting spectra positions form low-dimensional, extrinsically curved manifolds that span the ambient space. Tube model parameters that approximate the vocal tract configurations for various vowel phonemes determine the approximate manifold structure for several sustained vowel sounds. Using the manifolds for the phonemes /a/ and /æ/ as input, the manifold-based Laplacian eigenmap dimensionality reduction algorithm of Belkin and Niyogi [1] outperforms traditional principal component analysis, both with and without the introduction of noise.
AIMS: Assisted Indexing at Mississippi State

In this report, we describe the development of an automated system that aids human document analysts in the assignment of indexes to journal articles in the area of physical chemistry. AIMS (Assisted Indexing at Mississippi State) has two major components: a natural language processing (NLP) component and an index generation (IG) component. This report provides an overview of each component. The description of the NLP component focuses on the identification of units of the text and the attachment of appropriate tags to terms in the text. Primarily, there are two kinds of units of interest: phrasal units (such as prepositional phrases) and word collocations in which the "multi-word" may differ semantically from any of the individual words that make up the multi-word (e.g., "atmospheric pressure"). The tags include both syntactic and semantic tags (e.g.: noun/chemical substance). The discussion of the IG component describes how this component makes use of the parsed articles produced by the NLP component and some domain-specific information such as a hierarchy of chemistry concepts to generate a set of recommended indexes for a given article.
A study of acoustic features for the classification of depressed speech

Soft biometrics comprises the biological traits that are not sufficient for person authentication but can help to narrow the search space. Evidence of mental health state can be considered as a soft biometric, as it provides valuable information about the identity of an individual. Different approaches have been used for the automatic classification of speech in “depressed” or “non-depressed”, but the differences in algorithms, features, databases and performance measures make it difficult to draw conclusions about which features and techniques are more suitable for this task. In this work, the performance of different acoustic features for classification of depression in speech was studied in the framework of the audiovisual emotion challenge (AVEC 2013). To do so, an approach in which the audio data is segmented and projected into a total variability subspace was used, and these projected data was used to estimate the depression level by cosine distance scoring and majority voting.
DEM OCRATI ZATI ON AND WA R I N THE CONTEX T OF TI M E AND SPA CE

Ward and Gleditsch (1998) showed that democratization reduces war proneness; as contemporary poli ties become more democratic, the probabili ty that they will be involved in interstate war declines. This research reexamines and extends the previous work on the “dangerous democratization” versus “democratizing for peace” hypotheses in two major ways. First, we examine the claim that major powers have differential war proneness. Second, we explore the spatial and temporal contexts of a country’s immediate history and neighbors for clues about whether democratization promotes war or peace. Analyses indicate that the net effect of democratization on war involvement is robust with respect to various cross-sectional controls, such as major power status, and that countries with rocky transitions have higher probabili ties of war involvement. When the duration of peace is included, we find that changes in authority structures appear to have weak effects, if any, on the likelihood of war involvement. We find that countries situated in conflict-laden local or regional environments are much more likely to become involved in war. Three forces overwhelm all others in our analyses: the duration of peace is self-stimulating and reduces the war proneness of poli ties; the war involvement of neighbors and the extent to which democratization is proceeding smoothly each exert a strong upward pressure on the probabili ty of war involvement.
A Maximum Entropy Approach for Semantic Language Modeling

The conventional n-gram language model exploits only the immediate context of historical words without exploring long-distance semantic information. In this paper, we present a new information source extracted from latent semantic analysis (LSA) and adopt the maximum entropy (ME) principle to integrate it into an n-gram language model. With the ME approach, each information source serves as a set of constraints, which should be satisfied to estimate a hybrid statistical language model with maximum randomness. For comparative study, we also carry out knowledge integration via linear interpolation (LI). In the experiments on the TDT2 Chinese corpus, we find that the ME language model that combines the features of trigram and semantic information achieves a 17.9% perplexity reduction compared to the conventional trigram language model, and it outperforms the LI language model. Furthermore, in evaluation on a Mandarin speech recognition task, the ME and LI language models reduce the character error rate by 16.9% and 8.5%, respectively, over the bigram language model.
Does nutritionist review of a self-administered food frequency questionnaire improve data quality?

Abstract Objective: This study sought to evaluate the benefit of utilizing a nutritionist review of a self-administered food frequency questionnaire (FFQ), to determine whether accuracy could be improved beyond that produced by the self-administered questionnaire alone. Design: Participants randomized into a dietary intervention trial completed both a FFQ and a 4-day food record (FR) at baseline before entry into the intervention. The FFQ was self-administered, photocopied and then reviewed by a nutritionist who used additional probes to help complete the questionnaire. Both the versions – before nutritionist review and after nutritionist review – were individually compared on specific nutrients to the FR by means, correlations and per cent agreement into quintiles. Settings and subjects: Three hundred and twenty-four people, a subset of participants from the Polyp Prevention Trial – a randomized controlled trial examining the effect of a low-fat, high-fibre, high fruit and vegetable dietary pattern on the recurrence of adenomatous polyps – were recruited from clinical centres at the University of Utah, University of Buffalo, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Kaiser Permanente Medical Program in Oakland. Results: Reviewing the FFQ increased correlations with the FR for every nutrient, and per cent agreement into quintiles for all nutrients except calcium. Energy was underestimated in both versions of the FFQ but to a lesser degree in the version with review. Conclusions: One must further evaluate whether the increases seen with nutritionist review of the FFQ will enhance our ability to predict diet–disease relationships and whether it is cost-effective when participant burden and money spent utilizing trained personnel are considered.
When Abandoned Bits Bite Back - Reversibility and Quantum Computing

Reversible logic was originally proposed as a way to build classical computers with very low energy requirements. Its greatest impact so far has in fact been on the field of quantum computing, where it is used pervasively - but for an entirely different purpose. Quantum interference effects offer the potential for speeding up certain classical calculations. But if state information is expelled from a quantum computer into the unmodeled environment - as happens whenever an irreversible operation is performed - then it becomes impossible to predict or control when interference will occur. Reversibility is necessary because it allows bits to be erased by uncomputing them rather than simply expelling them, preserving control over interference effects.
Power spectrum density brainwave sub-band characteristics in ischemic stroke

This paper characterizes three different groups of stroke level and controlled group consists of healthy subject based on power spectrum density (PSD). In this study, the EEG data sets have been collected from hundred and thirty two subjects during closed eye (CE) session with a time frame approximately 8 minutes for each subject. They are divided into 4 groups which are Early Group (EG), Intermediate Group (IG), Advance Group (AG) and Controlled Group (CG). The results show that PSD technique can be used to distinguish between the stroke subject and healthy subject.
Heuristic Design and Energy Conservation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Precision Agriculture

A heuristic optimization algorithm for adaptive wireless sensor network design and energy management for precision agriculture is presented. The algorithm takes into account application-specific requirements, communication constraints and energy conservation characteristics. Genetic algorithms are used as the optimization tool of the developed system and an appropriate fitness function is developed to incorporate many aspects of network performance. It is shown that optimal sensor network designs constructed by the genetic algorithm system satisfy all application-specific requirements, fulfill the connectivity constraints and incorporate energy conservation characteristics. Energy management is optimized to guarantee maximum life duration of the network without lack of the network characteristics required by the precision agriculture application.
What determines how the value created by an alliance is divided among its members ? Studies of strategic alliances identify a mixture of cooperation and competition as key factors in interfirm

The differential benefits reaped by individual partners are a major determinant of the impact of strategic alliances on firm performance and an important (dis)incentive for alliance partners to collaborate in value creation. Theoretically, we lack an explicit theory of intra-alliance value division; empirically, previous analysis has been hampered by methodological challenges. We propose a bargaining framework for intra-alliance value appropriation, as well as a measure for capturing its variation. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 200 biotechnology R&D alliances, and are able to explain variation in value appropriation across alliance partners, partner types, and individual firms of each type. Copyright  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Detecting and Repairing Inconsistencies across Heterogeneous Models

With the advent of domain specific languages for model engineering, detecting inconsistencies between models is becoming increasingly challenging. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for models participating in the same development process to be captured using different modelling languages and even different modelling technologies. We present a classification of the types of relationships that can arise between models participating in a software development process and outline the types of inconsistencies each relationship can suffer from. From this classification we identify a set of requirements for a generic inconsistency detection and reconciliation mechanism and use a case study to demonstrate how those requirements are implemented in the Epsilon validation language (EVL), a task-specific language developed in the context of the Epsilon GMT component.
From “Me” the Scholar to “Me” the Saint: Reducing the Negative Behavioral and Affective Consequences of Contingent Self-worth

TAYLOR, SARAH G. , Ph.D., April 2017, Psychology From “Me” the Scholar to “Me” the Saint: Reducing the Negative Behavioral and Affective Consequences of Contingent Self-worth Director of dissertation: Mark D. Alicke The present studies support the assumption that when an important part of selfworth is threatened, priming a different part of self-worth reduces negative consequences associated with the threat. In particular, I test the hypothesis that shifting the weight, or temporary importance, from one contingency of self-worth (CSW) to a different contingency of self-worth will reduce self-handicapping and prevent lowered self-esteem and negative affect experienced when failure occurs in an important domain. Results across four studies partially support this hypothesis. Studies 1 and 2 limited the CSW domains to virtue and academic success. As predicted, priming a CSW that is inconsistent with the task domain (e.g., priming virtue after negative academic feedback), resulted in less self-handicapping relative to priming a CSW that is consistent with the task domain (e.g., priming academics after negative academic feedback). Similarly, for people whose self-worth is staked in academic success, an inconsistent prime/task procedure resulted in marginally higher self-esteem and less negative affect relative to a consistent prime/task procedure. Studies 3 and 4 extended the domain to athletics. Although significant differences were not found between consistent and inconsistent prime/task procedures with regard to self-esteem or negative affect (Study 4), overall sports domain importance interacted with prime/task consistency to predict self-
Effect of Chemical Mutagens and Carcinogens on Gene Expression Profiles in Human TK6 Cells

Characterization of toxicogenomic signatures of carcinogen exposure holds significant promise for mechanistic and predictive toxicology. In vitro transcriptomic studies allow the comparison of the response to chemicals with diverse mode of actions under controlled experimental conditions. We conducted an in vitro study in TK6 cells to characterize gene expression signatures of exposure to 15 genotoxic carcinogens frequently used in European industries. We also examined the dose-responsive changes in gene expression, and perturbation of biochemical pathways in response to these carcinogens. TK6 cells were exposed at 3 dose levels for 24 h with and without S9 human metabolic mix. Since S9 had an impact on gene expression (885 genes), we analyzed the gene expression data from cells cultures incubated with S9 and without S9 independently. The ribosome pathway was affected by all chemical-dose combinations. However in general, no similar gene expression was observed among carcinogens. Further, pathways, i.e. cell cycle, DNA repair mechanisms, RNA degradation, that were common within sets of chemical-dose combination were suggested by clustergram. Linear trends in dose–response of gene expression were observed for Trichloroethylene, Benz[a]anthracene, Epichlorohydrin, Benzene, and Hydroquinone. The significantly altered genes were involved in the regulation of (anti-) apoptosis, maintenance of cell survival, tumor necrosis factor-related pathways and immune response, in agreement with several other studies. Similarly in S9+ cultures, Benz[a]pyrene, Styrene and Trichloroethylene each modified over 1000 genes at high concentrations. Our findings expand our understanding of the transcriptomic response to genotoxic carcinogens, revealing the alteration of diverse sets of genes and pathways involved in cellular homeostasis and cell cycle control.