Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“I’m Just Not That Sick”

Purpose: To describe the beliefs and attitudes about self-identity and pain medication in a sample of Mexican American women with chronic pain living in the El Paso, Texas, area. The findings are drawn from a larger qualitative study of 15 women describing the expression and communication of chronic pain symptoms, pain-related cultural beliefs, decision making, and treatment preferences of chronic pain. Methods: Participants who had chronic pain syndromes for at least 1 year were recruited from a pain clinic and fibromyalgia support group. In-depth, open-ended interviews, fieldwork, and participant observation were used to gather information using a focused clinical ethnographic approach. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Findings: A shared central theme was controlling the use of pain medications to control perceived negative associations with pain medication. The negative associations resulted in women rejecting use of medication to preserve their legitimate identity. This perception can be destructive and can lead to poor pain control. Conclusion: Providing patients with anticipatory guidance about common barriers to taking pain medication may allow medication use consistent with improved pain control.
An overview of robot force control

This paper reports on the existing robot force control algorithms and their composition based on the review of 75 papers on this subject. The objective is to provide a pragmatic exposition with speciality on their differences and different application conditions, and to give a guide of the existing robot force control algorithms. The previous work can be categorized into discussion, design and/or application of fundamental force control techniques, stability analysis of the various control algorithms, and the advanced methods. Advanced methods combine the fundamental force control techniques with advanced control algorithms such as adaptive, robust and learning control strategies.
Contrasting migratory responses of two closely-related seabirds to long-term climate change

Many marine predators migrate between breeding and non-breeding areas to target resources that are seasonal but spatio-temporally predictable, and so are vulnerable to climate-induced changes in prey phenology and abundance. In the Southern Ocean, small petrels are major consumers, but perturbations in the ecosystem through ocean warming are altering food-web structure and have been linked to poleward shifts in the distribution of their cold-water zooplankton prey. In this study, we focused on 2 small congeneric petrels: the broad-billed prion Pachyptila vittata and the Antarctic prion P. desolata. Both are planktivorous, but the broad-billed prion specialises in feeding on large copepods. We investigated historical trends in non-breeding distribution by analysing feather stable isotope ratios from a time-series dating back to 1926, and examined contemporary non-breeding distributions of broad-billed prions tracked using miniaturised geolocation-immersion loggers. After controlling temporally for the Suess effect, we found that the δ13C signatures of Antarctic prions, but not broad-billed prions, declined during the study period. This suggests a southward shift in Antarctic prion non-breeding distribution over the last century. Both species exhibited significant declines in δ15N during the same period, indicative of long-term decreases in marine productivity in their moulting areas, or changes in the trophic structure of prey communities. Tracked broad-billed prions migrated ca. 1000 km to an area east of the breeding colony where the Louisville seamount chain bisects the subtropical front. Topographically driven upwellings are stable and predictable features and may be crucial in aggregating plankton. Targeting seamounts could therefore mitigate the impact of climate-induced prey shifts by providing refugia for the broad-billed prion.
Voltage control and hysteresis current control of a 8/6 switched reluctance motor

The switched reluctance motor (SRM) can develop either positive or negative torque based on the turn-on or turn- off angles of the converter. Positive torque is developed if the turn-on and turn-off angles are confined to the positive or zero increasing inductance region of stator winding. The torque & speed ripples greatly depend on these angles. The effect of turn- off angle of the converter on the dynamic performance of the SRM is studied. It is analyzed for voltage control as well as hysteresis current control at no-load. An optimal value of turn- off angle which gives minimum torque & speed ripples can be obtained.
Differential expression of secreted aspartyl proteinases in a model of human oral candidosis and in patient samples from the oral cavity

Candida albicans, an opportunistic pathogen in humans, secretes secretory aspartyl proteinases (Saps), which have been correlated with virulence. We examined the temporal regulation of the mRNA expression of seven known members of the SAP gene family by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT–PCR) in (i) an in vitro model of oral candidosis based on reconstituted human epithelium (RHE); and (ii) clinical samples from patients with oral candidosis. SAP1 and SAP3 transcripts were first detected 42 h after inoculation of RHE, while at the same time, slight morphological alterations in the epithelium were documented by light microscopy. SAP6 expression occurred 6 h later concomitantly with germ tube formation of some infecting Candida cells and severe lesions of the epithelial tissue. SAP2 and SAP8 RT–PCR products were first detected 60 h after infection, while SAP4 and SAP5 transcripts were never discovered. Thus, a temporal progression of SAP expression in the order SAP1 and SAP3 > SAP6 > SAP2 and SAP8 was observed at the same time as increasing RHE damage occurred. At the protein level, Sap antigen was found within the C. albicans yeast cells and the epithelial cells by immunoelectron microscopy using an anti‐Sap murine monoclonal antibody directed against the gene products Sap1–3. Expression of SAP1–3 and 6 was also detected by RT–PCR in samples from patients suffering from oral candidosis. Our results suggest that the pathogenesis of experimental and clinical oral candidosis is associated with the differential and temporal regulation of SAP gene expression.
Response of Leptospira interrogans to Physiologic Osmolarity: Relevance in Signaling the Environment-to-Host Transition

ABSTRACT Transmission of pathogenic Leptospira between mammalian hosts usually involves dissemination via soil or water contaminated by the urine of carrier animals. The ability of Leptospira to adapt to the diverse conditions found inside and outside the host is reflected in its relatively large genome size and high percentage of signal transduction genes. An exception is Leptospira borgpetersenii serovar Hardjo, which is transmitted by direct contact and appears to have lost genes necessary for survival outside the mammalian host. Invasion of host tissues by Leptospira interrogans involves a transition from a low osmolar environment outside the host to a higher physiologic osmolar environment within the host. Expression of the lipoprotein LigA and LigB adhesins is strongly induced by an upshift in osmolarity to the level found in mammalian host tissues. These data suggest that Leptospira utilizes changes in osmolarity to regulate virulence characteristics. To better understand how L. interrogans serovar Copenhageni adapts to osmolar conditions that correspond with invasion of a mammalian host, we quantified alterations in transcript levels using whole-genome microarrays. Overnight exposure in leptospiral culture medium supplemented with sodium chloride to physiologic osmolarity significantly altered the transcript levels of 6% of L. interrogans genes. Repressed genes were significantly more likely to be absent or pseudogenes in L. borgpetersenii, suggesting that osmolarity is relevant in studying the adaptation of L. interrogans to host conditions. Genes induced by physiologic osmolarity encoded a higher than expected number of proteins involved in signal transduction. Further, genes predicted to encode lipoproteins and those coregulated by temperature were overrepresented among both salt-induced and salt-repressed genes. In contrast, leptospiral homologues of hyperosmotic or general stress genes were not induced at physiologic osmolarity. These findings suggest that physiologic osmolarity is an important signal for regulation of gene expression by pathogenic leptospires during transition from ambient conditions to the host tissue environment.
Relative error issues in sampled data models

Abstract Most real world systems operate in continuous time. However, to store, analyze or transmit data from such systems the signals must first be sampled. Consequently there has been on-going interest in sampled data models for continuous time systems. The emphasis in the literature to-date has been on three main issues namely the impact of folding, sampled zero dynamics and the associated model error quantification. Existing error analyses have almost exclusively focused on unnormalized performance. However, in many applications relative errors are more important. For example, high performance controllers tend to invert the system dynamics and consequently relative errors underpin closed loop performance issues including robustness and stability. This motivates us to examine the relative errors associated with several common sampled data model types. This analysis reveals that the inclusion of appropriate zero dynamics is essential to ensure that the relative error converges to zero as the sampling period is reduced.
Topic naming service for DDS

Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a standard communication middleware that is suitable for real-time distributed communication with enhanced flexibility, scalability and interoperability. DDS discovery is a procedure to search the participants and endpoints of DDS network. DDS relies on a multicast mechanism in discovering DDS participants. Due to the features of multicast, DDS has limited discovery range and excessive network traffic. It also wastes of memory space of DDS nodes to keep information of discovered but not communicating participants. Topic Naming Service (TNS) is proposed in this paper in order to solve these problems. TNS maintains a Topic Name Space for managing relationships between endpoints. It selectively delivers discovery messages to appropriate local networks according to the relationship, instead of multicasting the message into the whole network. Through these mechanisms, TNS solves the range limitation of discovery and inefficient resource usage of DDS.
Change detection using multiscale segmentation and Kullback-Leibler divergence: Application on road damage extraction

This paper addresses the problem of change detection from very high resolution remotely sensed images and its application on road damage extraction in case of major disaster. The proposed methodology is based on the multiscale image segmentation using the Haar wavelet in order to define the appropriate unit of analysis for the comparison step. The Kullback-Leibler divergence is then applied as a similarity measurement to identify changed regions. This strategy is adapted to solve the road damage extraction problem by applying the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST). The images acquired during the earthquake that hits Port-au-Prince (Haiti) on 12 January 2010 are used in the experimentations and the obtained results demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of the described method.
Social Welfare Maximization in Transmission Enhancement Considering Network Congestion

Transmission enhancement in a competitive electricity market is analyzed in terms of its impact on the social welfare. A formulation of social welfare and the utility functions are derived in this research. Variations of supply and demand during a year are considered in transmission enhancement decisions. The proposed social welfare optimization problem is solved to determine the transmission congestion status under the optimal condition of the existing system. Transmission enhancement options are compared quantitatively to demonstrate their ability to increase social welfare, which provides valuable information for long-term transmission. The proposed method provides a systematic and quantitative tool for social welfare evaluation that is not available in industry today.
A secondary voltage control method for an AC/DC coupled transmission system based on model predictive control

For an AC/DC coupled transmission system, the change of transmission power on the DC lines will significantly influence the AC systems' voltage. This paper describes a method to coordinated control the reactive power of power plants and shunt capacitors at DC converter stations nearby, in order to keep the voltage of the pilot bus tracking its set point considering the DC system's transmission schedule change. The approach is inspired by model predictive control (MPC) to compensate for predictable voltage change affected by DC side transmission power flow and the potential capacitor switching at DC converter stations. The control strategies are calculated from a multi-step dynamic optimization problem that is solved by mixed integer quadratic programming method. Time-domain simulations showed positive results of the proposed voltage controller.
Initial Stages in the Biodegradation of the Surfactant Sodium Dodecyltriethoxy Sulfate by Pseudomonas sp. Strain DES1

The biodegradation of the surfactant sodium dodecyltriethoxy sulfate by Pseudomonas sp. , strain DES1 (isolated from activated sludge plant effluent) has been studied. Growth of the organism when the 35S-labeled surfactant was present as the sole source of carbon and energy led to the appearance in the culture fluid of five 35S-labeled organic metabolites. These have been identified as mono-, di-, and triethylene glycol monosulfates (major metabolites) and acetic acid 2-(ethoxy sulfate) and acetic acid 2-(diethoxy sulfate), authentic samples of which have been prepared and characterized. Evidence is presented that the major metabolites were produced by rupture of one or another of the three ether linkages present in the surfactant molecule, probably via the agency of a single etherase enzyme. Acetic acid 2-(ethoxy sulfate) and acetic acid 2-(diethoxy sulfate) were formed by the oxidation of the free alcohol groups of di- and triethylene glycol monosulfates, respectively, and increased in amount during the stationary phase of growth. Inorganic 35S-sulfate also appeared in significant quantities in culture fluids and arose from the parent surfactant (presumably via the action of an alkylsulfatase) and not from any of the five metabolites. The appearance of sulfated organic metabolites during the exponential phase of growth and their quantitative relationship remained remarkably constant, even when additional carbon and energy sources (succinate or yeast extract) were also present in the growth media.
Bullied no more: when and how DNA shoves proteins around

Abstract The predominant protein-centric perspective in protein–DNA-binding studies assumes that the protein drives the interaction. Research focuses on protein structural motifs, electrostatic surfaces and contact potentials, while DNA is often ignored as a passive polymer to be manipulated. Recent studies of DNA topology, the supercoiling, knotting, and linking of the helices, have shown that DNA has the capability to be an active participant in its transactions. DNA topology-induced structural and geometric changes can drive, or at least strongly influence, the interactions between protein and DNA. Deformations of the B-form structure arise from both the considerable elastic energy arising from supercoiling and from the electrostatic energy. Here, we discuss how these energies are harnessed for topology-driven, sequence-specific deformations that can allow DNA to direct its own metabolism.
to Artificial Bandwidth Extension Based on Deep BLSTM Recurrent Neural Networks and Exemplar-based Sparse Representation

This paper presents a two stages artificial bandwidth extension (ABE) framework which combine deep bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural network with exemplar-based sparse representation to estimate missing frequency band. It demonstrates the suitability of proposed method for modeling log power spectra of speech signals in ABE. The BLSTM-RNN which can capture information from anywhere in the feature sequence is used to estimate the log power spectra in the high-band firstly and the exemplar-based sparse representation which could alleviate the oversmoothing problem is applied to generated log power spectra in the second stage. In addition, rich acoustic features in the low-band are considered to reduce the reconstruction error. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve significant improvements in both objective and subjective measures over the different baseline methods.
Angle Independence Properties of Fractal Dimension Maps Estimated From SAR Data

The extremely remarkable properties of angle independence exhibited by an innovative SAR product, the fractal dimension map estimated from a single SAR image, are discussed. The theoretical analysis is supported by a noticeable data set of actual SAR images acquired, with look angles varying from 20° to 45°, in the stripmap operational mode by the COSMO-SkyMed constellation. The behavior of the fractal dimension maps at different look angles is discussed for both natural and urban scenarios and emphasis is also posed on areas within the same image that, according to the scene macroscopic topography, are characterized by different incidence angles. The whole analysis is aimed at highlighting, on the one hand, the specific independencies of natural surface fractal dimension maps from the look angle and from the local incidence angle, which can be very useful in information extraction and SAR post-processing techniques and, on the other hand, the different fractal dimension maps behavior whereas urban areas are analyzed.
Didactic Material Resources in the Teaching of National History and Geography: Selected Results of a Qualitative Survey

The paper is the first output of a larger research project conducted at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Králové, which deals with an improved understanding of teachers' work in the subject of National History and Geography. Partial findings focusing on the use of didactic material resources in teaching are presented in this phase. With the regard to promotion of independent activity of students within learner based education, material equipment of schools with didactic aids is becoming increasingly important. This paper is based on qualitative research, where the possibilities and mainly the reasons for use of material didactic resources in teaching were investigated through semistructured interviews. Attention was focused on ways of working with different teaching aids and their implementation in the educational process. It turns out that teachers accept current constructivist and humanistic approaches to education associated with the requirement to prepare students for life in an information society, and accordingly they adjust their teaching. Keywords—Primary education, National History and Geography, didactic material resources, qualitative research.
Binge Drinking, Marijuana Use, and Friendships: The Relationship Between Similar and Dissimilar Usage and Friendship Quality

Abstract While it is commonly understood that the substance use of peers influences an individual's substance use, much less is understood about the interplay between substance use and friendship quality. Using a sample of 2,148 emerging adults nested within 1,074 dyadic friendships, this study separately investigates how concordance and discordance in binge drinking and marijuana use between friends is related to each friend's perceptions of friendship quality. Because “friendship quality” is a complex construct, we employ a measure containing five sub-elements – companionship, a lack of conflict, willingness to help a friend, relationship security, and closeness. Results for both binge drinking and marijuana use reveal that individuals in friendship pairs who are concordant in their substance use perceive significantly higher perceptions of friendship quality than individuals in dyads who are dissimilar in substance use. Specifically, concordant binge drinkers estimate significantly higher levels of companionship, relationship security, and willingness to help their friend than concordant non-users, discordant users, and discordant non-users. However, the highest amount of conflict in friendships is found when both friends engage in binge drinking and marijuana use. Several interpretations of these findings are discussed. Overall, concordance between friends’ binge drinking and marijuana use appears to help some elements of friendship quality and harm others.
A Multi-label Least-Squares Hashing For Scalable Image Search

Recently, hashing methods have attracted more and more attentions for their effectiveness in large scale data search, e.g., images and videos data. etc. For different s-cenarios, unsupervised, supervised and semi-supervised hashing methods have been proposed. Especially, when semantic information is available, supervised hashing methods show better performance than unsupervised ones. In many practical applications, one sample usually has more than one label, which has been considered by multi-label learning. However, few supervised hashing methods consider such scenario. In this paper, we propose a Multi-label Least-Squares Hashing (MLSH) method for multi-label data hashing. It can directly work well on multi-label data; moreover, unlike other hashing methods which directly learn hashing function-s on original data, MLSH first utilizes the equivalen-t form of CCA and Least-Squares to project original multi-label data into lower-dimensional space; then, in the lower-dimensional space, it learns the project matrix and gets final binary codes of data. MLSH is tested on NUS-WIDE and CIFAR-100 which are widely used for searching task. The results show that MLSH outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing methods including supervised and unsupervised methods.
Ubiquitin Ligases in Malignant Lymphoma

The highly controlled degradation of proteins via the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway represents a key mechanism for cell regulation and homeostasis. Ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis, carried out in large part by the E3 ubiquitin ligases, is a critical mode of post-translational modification that is important in regulation of cell cycle progression, signal transduction, gene transcription, antigen receptor signaling, immune response and cell differentiation. Recent studies demonstrate that increasing numbers of proteins with ubiquitin ligase activity are being characterized. Identification and characterization of their substrates indicate that they regulate the turnover of key cell cycle proteins (p27Kip1, p21Cip1, p57Kip2, cyclin E), tumor suppressor proteins (p53, RB), signaling kinases (Src, Zap70, PI-3 kinase), apoptosis regulators (Bcl-2, Bax, Bik) and transcription factors (Myc, NF-kappaB, E1F1), all of which have been implicated in the pathogenesis of malignant lymphoma. Studies to determine the functional role of ubiquitin ligases in the pathogenesis of malignant lymphoma represent potential areas of investigation.