Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A HYBRID ALGORITHM FOR MOTIF DISCOVERY FROM DNA SEQUENCES

We propose a new hybrid algorithm that combines the strengths of probabilistic and deterministic approaches, for motif discovery from DNA sequences. This algorithm consists of a sequence filtering component that uses a probabilistic strategy, and a graph-theoretic motif finding component that utilizes a deterministic algorithm. We show that the algorithm can correctly find the target motif(s) with high probability. We perform experiments on synthetic and real biological datasets and observe that the algorithm offers a promising method for motif discovery from biological sequences.
Parental e-nvolvement: a phenomenological research on electronic parental involvement1

Abstract This phenomenological study explored parental e-nvolvement (or electronic parental involvement), defined as parental efforts to plan, engage in, support, monitor and/or assess the learning experiences of their children either at home or at school predominantly using technological devices and media. Data were gathered from 23 volunteering parents through semi-structured interviews. The findings suggested that most parents use or have their children use a variety of technologies with tablets, computers, (smart)phones, and internet taking the lead. Participating parents used technology to have their children study, make practice on or repeat what they have learned at school, to help them prepare research projects, homework or presentations, and to communicate with teachers, schools and other parents. The pros of parental e-nvolvement mainly included enabling parents to supervise their children in terms of academic, personal or social well-being; increasing technology literacy; enabling easy and quick access to information sources; enhancing learner autonomy and academic achievement. Cons included mainly the risk of exposure to inconvenient websites/content; technology addiction; and making the child antisocial. Finally, different strategies to parents use to prevent their children from the harms and risks during parental e-nvolvement were presented and discussed.
Segment Based Stereo Matching Using Cooperative Hopfield Networks

This paper proposes a segment based dense stereo algorithm using cooperative Hopfield networks. It uses two Hopfield networks with similar structure to solve energy minimization problem in stereo matching parallely. In order to escape from local minima and speed the convergence of network, a coarse-to-fine strategy is employed. Firstly, the stereo image pairs are divided into non-overlapping homogeneous regions which can be represented as a set of layers in the disparity space. Then after each disparity layer is estimated, the more refined process is implemented in pixel domain. Experiments indicate this method has good performance and rapid convergence speed. Moreover, it is insensitive to initial conditions of the neural networks and the neuron update orders
Membrane Composition Changes and Physiological Adaptation by Streptococcus mutans Signal Recognition Particle Pathway Mutants

ABSTRACT Previously, we presented evidence that the oral cariogenic species Streptococcus mutans remains viable but physiologically impaired and sensitive to environmental stress when genes encoding the minimal conserved bacterial signal recognition particle (SRP) elements are inactivated. Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis of isolated membrane fractions from strain UA159 and three mutants (Δffh, ΔscRNA, and ΔftsY) grown at pH 7.0 or pH 5.0 allowed us to obtain insight into the adaptation process and the identities of potential SRP substrates. Mutant membrane preparations contained increased amounts of the chaperones DnaK and GroES and ClpP protease but decreased amounts of transcription- and translation-related proteins, the β subunit of ATPase, HPr, and several metabolic and glycolytic enzymes. Therefore, the acid sensitivity of SRP mutants might be caused in part by diminished ATPase activity, as well as the absence of an efficient mechanism for supplying ATP quickly at the site of proton elimination. Decreased amounts of LuxS were also observed in all mutant membranes. To further define physiological changes that occur upon disruption of the SRP pathway, we studied global gene expression in S. mutans UA159 (parent strain) and AH333 (Δffh mutant) using microarray analysis. Transcriptome analysis revealed up-regulation of 81 genes, including genes encoding chaperones, proteases, cell envelope biosynthetic enzymes, and DNA repair and replication enzymes, and down-regulation of 35 genes, including genes concerned with competence, ribosomal proteins, and enzymes involved in amino acid and protein biosynthesis. Quantitative real-time reverse transcription-PCR analysis of eight selected genes confirmed the microarray data. Consistent with a demonstrated defect in competence and the suggested impairment of LuxS-dependent quorum sensing, biofilm formation was significantly decreased in each SRP mutant.
Robots cut risks and costs in nuclear power plants

Teleoperated robots used to reduce employee exposure to radiation and to achieve measurable and often significant cost savings are described. The robots are mobile, people-machine systems, with a human in the loop guiding their movements and operation. They are remotely operated vehicles that consist of three systems: a computer, a sensor, and a mechanical structure. They go into controlled radiation areas and perform routine surveillance and inspection tasks. Present and future applications of teleoperated robots in power plants are identified. Three robots used at the author's company are described. <<ETX>>
Would You Like to Know More? Selection, Socialization, and the Political Attitudes of Military Veterans

Although an initial wave of research during the Vietnam War era suggested that the political attitudes of American veterans were not significantly different from those of the public at large, more recent studies argue that this may no longer be true. Thus far, however, the reason for this difference has gone unexplored: are veterans from the volunteer era different because a certain type of person is drawn to military life (selection), or are their attitudes shaped by their experience of service (socialization)? Using new survey data on the political attitudes of Americans, and statistical techniques designed to improve our estimation of the difference between selection and socialization effects, we examine this question, assessing the extent to which the two factors play a role in this attitudinal difference. Our results have implications for political representation, as well as the impact of partisan polarization and recruitment patterns on civil–military relations.
A Very Low Luminosity, Very Cool, DC White Dwarf

The star LHS 3250 is found to be a white dwarf at a distance of 30 pc. Its absolute magnitudes (MV = 15.72, Mbol = 16.2) put it among the least luminous white dwarfs known. Its optical spectrum shows no features, indicating that it has a DC classification, and it shows no detectable polarization, indicating that it does not have a very strong magnetic field. However, its broadband colors show it to have a unique spectral energy distribution, and it stands out from all other stars in BVI and other broadband photometric surveys. We discuss these properties and conclude that LHS 3250 must be an extremely cool white dwarf with strong collision-induced absorption at red-infrared wavelengths from molecular hydrogen, in accord with models for very cool white dwarf atmospheres. If so, it is the first such star known and the first star to provide observational evidence supporting these models. It suggests that other very cool white dwarfs, both halo white dwarfs and the oldest disk white dwarfs, also may have colors affected by similar absorption. The atmospheric composition of LHS 3250 is not known, and therefore its temperature is poorly determined. It is likely to be a helium-core star with a mass 0.3 < M < 0.45 M☉ and a product of mass transfer in a close binary system. However, until its temperature is better known, its mass and age remain uncertain.
One-sided object cutout using principal-channels

We introduce principal-channels for cutting out objects from an image by one-sided scribbles. We demonstrate that few scribbles, all from within the object of interest, are sufficient to mark it out. One-sided scribbles provide significantly less information than two-sided ones. Thus, it is required to maximize the use of image-information. Our approach is to first analyze the image with a large filter bank and generate a high-dimensional feature space. We then extract a set of principal-channels that discern one object from another. We show that by applying an iterative graph-cut optimization over the principal-channels, we can cut out the object of interest.
The Influence of Negative Life Events and Problem Behavior on Grades in Early Adolescence: Pathways to Academic Risk in the Middle Grades

Abstract Younger adolescents demonstrate a greater vulnerability to negative life events than do older adolescents and adults. The authors examined whether this heightened vulnerability includes a greater likelihood for participating in problem behaviors associated with poor academic outcomes and receiving lower grades. The study was conducted using data from essentially the whole population of Iceland in the specified age group. Thus, the researchers were able to understand this relationship within traditionally high-risk populations as well as all young people representing the full range of possible risk. All middle grades and high school students who attended school at the time of the study completed a cross-sectional survey that included self-reports of negative life events (NLEs), participation in problem behaviors, and grades (n = 7,291, ~ 86% of population). Structural equation modeling indicated a strong pathway between NLEs, problem behaviors, and grades. For boys in the middle grades experiencing NLEs, problem behaviors mediated 100% of the variance in grades, while it mediated 56% of the variance among girls in the middle grades. Implications for research and practice are provided.
Suspicious Behavior Detection in Debit Card Transactions using Data Mining: A Comparative Study using Hybrid Models

The approach used in this paper is an implementation of a data mining process against real-life transactions of debit cards with the aim of detecting suspicious behavior. The framework designed for this purpose has been obtained through merging supervised and unsupervised models. First, due to unlabeled data, Twostep and Self-Organizing Map algorithms have been used in clustering the transactions. A C5.0 classification algorithm has been applied to evaluate supervised models and also to detect suspicious behaviors. An innovative plan has been designed to evaluate hybrid models and select the most appropriate model for the solution of the fraud detection problem. The evaluation of the models and the final analysis of the data took place in four stages. The appropriate hybrid model was selected from among 16 models. The results show a high ability of selected model in detecting suspicious behavior in transactions involving debit cards.
Assisted living expansion and the market for nursing home care.

OBJECTIVE To analyze the effect of market-level changes in assisted living supply on nursing home utilization and resident acuity. DATA SOURCES Primary data on the supply of assisted living over time were collected from 13 states from 1993 through 2007 and merged with nursing home-level data from the Online Survey Certification and Reporting System and market-level information from the Area Resource File. STUDY DESIGN Least squares regression specification incorporating market and time-fixed effects. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A 10 percent increase in assisted living capacity led to a 1.4 percent decline in private-pay nursing home occupancy and a 0.2-0.6 percent increase in patient acuity. CONCLUSIONS Assisted living serves as a potential substitute for nursing home care for some healthier individuals with greater financial resources, suggesting implications for policy makers, providers, and consumers.
Distributed Learning in the Smart Grid

In this article, the smart grid is modeled as a decentralized and hierarchical network, made of three categories of agents: producers, providers and microgrids. To optimize their decisions concerning the energy prices and the traded quantities of energy, the agents need to forecast the energy productions and the demand of the microgrids. The biases resulting from the decentralized learning might create imbalances between demand and supply, leading to penalties for the providers and for the producers. We determine analytically prices that provide to the producers a guarantee to avoid such penalties, reporting all the risk on the providers. Additionally, we prove that collaborative learning, through a grand coalition of providers where information is shared and forecasts aligned on a single value, minimizes their average risk. Simulations, run on a toy network, lead us to observe that the convergence rates of the collaborative learning strategy are clearly superior to rates resulting from distributed learning, using external and internal regret minimization.
The importance of sensitive parenting : a longitudinal adoption study on maternal sensitivity, problem behavior, and cortisol secretion

The current thesis focuses on the longitudinal development of early-adopted children in the Leiden Longitudinal Adoption Study (LLAS). In the LLAS, adopted children were followed from infancy until young adulthood. In Chapter 1 we discuss the role of sensitive parenting and the precursors and developmental outcomes of attachment security. In the empirical study in Chapter 2 we report on the concurrent as well as longitudinal relations between maternal sensitivity, child temperament, and externalizing behavior problems. In the second empirical study in Chapter 3, we follow this line of enquiry and investigate concurrent and longitudinal relations between maternal sensitivity, child temperament and internalizing behavior problems. Chapter 4 reports on the final empirical study of the thesis, and focuses on the associations between maternal sensitivity and attachment in infancy and the diurnal cortisol curve in young adulthood. Our empirical studies show that maternal sensitivity in infancy and middle childhood indirectly predicts fewer internalizing behavior problems in adopted adolescents, and that maternal sensitivity in adolescence predicts less concurrent delinquent behavior. Attachment experiences in early life do not predict the adoptees’ diurnal cortisol curve in later life. In Chapter 5 we discuss these results and some methodological issues more thoroughly.
RGRank: Ranking Semantically Related Genes

Biologists often need to know the set of genes that are semantically related to a given set of genes. However, most current similarity measures determine the semantic (biological meaning) similarities between the set rather than identifying the set. Moreover, these similarity measures determine the semantic similarities between the genes based solely on the proximity of their GO term annotations to each other in GO graph while overlooking the structural dependencies between these terms, which may lead to lower recall and precision of results. We propose in this paper a search engine called RGRank, which overcomes the limitations of current similarity measures outlined above as follows: (1) Given a set S of genes, RGRank would return a set of genes, where each gene in is semantically related to each gene in, (2) RGRank ranks gene results by relevance to their semantic similarities to the input genes, and (3) RGRank employs the concept of existence dependency to determine the structural dependencies among the GO terms annotating a given set of gene. We evaluated RGRank experimentally and compared it with three existing methods. Results showed marked improvement.
A methodology of autonomous navigation in 3-D space under location uncertainty

This paper addresses the methodology for constructing autonomous navigation schemes for which the path and free space corridor along the path are precomputed by means of Voronoi Diagram methods of computational geometry, and in which the position and the velocity of the vehicle are not exactly known during the navigation process. Such navigation schemes are useful in applications such as the routing of maneuvering missiles or robotic vehicles so that they, by traveling through the free space corridor, will avoid obstacles. An autonomous navigation scheme can be implemented by building it around an estimator which during the navigation process, can cyclically estimates not only the position and velocity of the craft but also the errors in the estimates of these two quantities. Kalman filter (KF) and, to a lesser extent, certain nonlinear extensions of KF, provide a formalism for estimating these errors through the estimates of estimation error covariances, also through the estimation of certain errors as a part of the system state vector. In practice, the use of this formalism requires a great deal of caution. During each navigation cycle, the estimates of position and velocity errors, computed in that cycle, can then be used to construct an uncertainty ellipsoid for position, which in turn is used to make a corrective adjustment in the course of the vehicle.
Home Visiting in Two Cultures

ABSTRACT The home visiting component of early childhood education programs provides an important portal through which to observe family interactions as well as gain insights about the ethnotheories of the home visitor. Home visits were videotaped in the United States and in Turkey to analyze training and program effectiveness. One striking feature of this comparison was the role played by the home visitor in interpreting the cultural values associated with the intervention program. The videos portrayed home visits as cultural windows into intervention priorities. To capture the perspectives represented in the home visit videos, a video-cued multivocal ethnographic method was used to investigate cultural meanings attributed to home visiting practices. Focus groups of Turkish home visitors watched a video from an American home visiting program and focus groups of American home visitors watched a video from Turkish home visiting program. A semistructured set of discussion questions followed the videos, and the group responses were recorded. The resultant thematic analysis revealed culturally informed collections of professional beliefs and expectations. As the focus groups interpreted the practices of professionals from another culture, their comments revealed their own cultural perspectives on the roles to be played by home visitors in the lives of families.
Highly Active and Stable Large Catalase Isolated from a Hydrocarbon Degrading Aspergillus terreus MTCC 6324

A hydrocarbon degrading Aspergillus terreus MTCC 6324 produces a high level of extremely active and stable cellular large catalase (CAT) during growth on n-hexadecane to combat the oxidative stress caused by the hydrocarbon degrading metabolic machinery inside the cell. A 160-fold purification with specific activity of around 66 × 105 U mg−1 protein was achieved. The native protein molecular mass was 368 ± 5 kDa with subunit molecular mass of nearly 90 kDa, which indicates that the native CAT protein is a homotetramer. The isoelectric pH (pI) of the purified CAT was 4.2. BLAST aligned peptide mass fragments of CAT protein showed its highest similarity with the catalase B protein from other fungal sources. CAT was active in a broad range of pH 4 to 12 and temperature 25°C to 90°C. The catalytic efficiency (K cat/K m) of 4.7 × 108 M−1 s−1 within the studied substrate range and alkaline pH stability (half-life, t 1/2 at pH 12~15 months) of CAT are considerably higher than most of the extensively studied catalases from different sources. The storage stability (t 1/2) of CAT at physiological pH 7.5 and 4°C was nearly 30 months. The haem was identified as haem b by electrospray ionization tandem mass spectroscopy (ESI-MS/MS).
Interracial Lesbian And Gay Couples: Navigating Private And Public Experiences

This study explores the private and public experiences of Black/White interracial lesbian and gay couples. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of critical race theory and intersectional feminism, this research focuses on how the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality influence relationship experiences and family processes in both private and public spaces for interracial same-sex couples. This study is based on 19 in-depth interviews with individuals in Black/White lesbian and gay relationships. Participants’ stories highlight intersectionality in terms of the ways interracial lesbian and gay couples navigate these interpersonal and public spaces. Participant experiences suggest that the dichotomy of private/public is often blurred, and these two spaces frequently overlap and intersect. Often what participants experience in public is then discussed and interpreted within private spaces. It is in the private space that participants work through complex issues in order to present themselves as a couple in public. Participants frequently used their public and interpersonal experiences with their partners to be reflexive of their own understandings of the social world, relationship processes, and love. Given the lack of research on same-sex, interracial families, this study makes an important contribution to sociological research on families, LGTBQ studies, and race
Lexical Substitution Dataset for German

This article describes a lexical substitution dataset for German. The whole dataset contains 2,040 sentences from the German Wikipedia, with one target word in each sentence. There are 51 target nouns, 51 adjectives, and 51 verbs randomly selected from 3 frequency groups based on the lemma frequency list of the German WaCKy corpus. 200 sentences have been annotated by 4 professional annotators and the remaining sentences by 1 professional annotator and 5 additional annotators who have been recruited via crowdsourcing. The resulting dataset can be used to evaluate not only lexical substitution systems, but also different sense inventories and word sense disambiguation systems.
Identification and switching quasi-LPV control of a four wheeled omnidirectional robot

This paper presents the quasi-Linear Parameter Varying (quasi-LPV) modeling, identification and control of a four wheeled omnidirectional robot. The unknown nonlinear model parameters of the four wheeled robot have been calibrated by means of the nonlinear least squares identification approach and validated against real data. Introducing a reference model that generates the desired trajectory, the resulting nonlinear error model is brought to a quasi-LPV form suitable for designing a controller using Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). In particular, the controller is obtained within the switching LPV framework. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown and proved through experimental results.