Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Report of Two Outbreaks of Equine Encephalomyelitis in Saskatchewan.

URING the early part of August 1935, reports were received from the northern states of the Union and from the province of Manitoba that a great many horses were suffering from a disease believed to be encephalomyelitis. Shortly after the reported outbreak in Manitoba, isolated cases of the same disease were recognized in south-eastern Saskatchewan, and in the course of a week to ten days the outbreak had assumed quite serious proportions. From the south-east the disease spread rapidly westwards, north, and towards the central sections, until in a short space of time cases could be observed one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles from the original outbreak. A journey through the districts where the outbreak was most severe revealed the fact that, although the disease had visited nearly every farm and attacked animals of all ages, seldom did it affect more than one or two individuals on any one holding. G
Tight Worst-Case Performance Bounds for Next-k-Fit Bin Packing

The bin packing problem is to pack a list of reals in $( {0,1} ]$ into unit-capacity bins using the minimum number of bins. Let $R[A]$ be the limiting worst value for the ratio ${{A(L)} / {L^ * }}$ as $L^ * $ goes to $\infty $, where $A(L)$ denotes the number of bins used in the approximation algorithm A, and $L^ * $ denotes the minimum number of bins needed to pack L. Obviously, $R[A]$ reflects the worst-case behavior of A. For Next-k-Fit($NkF$ for short, $k \geqslant 2$), which is a linear time approximation algorithm for bin packing, it was known that $1.7 + \frac{3}{{10(k - 1)}} \leqslant R[NkF] \leqslant 2$. In this paper, a tight bound $R[NkF] = 1.7 + \frac{3}{{10(k - 1)}}$ is proved.
A review of current treatment strategies for varicose veins.

OBJECTIVES To systematically review data to determine if endovenous laser ablation (EVLA), radio frequency ablation (RFA), and foam sclerotherapy (FS) have any advantages or disadvantages in comparison with conventional surgical ligation and stripping of great saphenous vein (GSV) varices. EVLA VERSUS SURGERY The failure rate of GSV closure after EVLA was between 0% to 34%. In comparison the recurrence rate after high ligation and stripping was up to 28% in a meta analysis of 7 studies. The overall complication rate after EVLA is about 20%. This showed no difference from that after primary LSV surgery which is between 17% and 20%. RFA VERSUS SURGERY There was no significant difference between RFA and surgery in terms of symptoms improvement. However, the pain score was better in the RFA groups. Moreover, there was significant difference in the sick leave taken after each treatment with the mean of 6.5 days and 4.7 days for RFA, and 15.6 days and 12.4 days for surgery. RFA versus EVLT: Immediate technical success was obtained in all (100%) of EVLA procedures and in (96%) of RFA cases. The overall complication rate was (20.8%) after EVLA and 7.6% after RFA. FOAM SCLEROTHERAPY The recurrence rate after sclerotherapy reached 30.5 % after one year, and 51% after 10 years. However, the rates were better for foam than the liquid sclerosants. When compared to surgery, sclerotherapy had higher recurrence rate than that after surgery. The median time to return to normal activities was significantly reduced in the foam sclerotherapy group (2 days) compared to the surgical group (8 days). CURRENT & FUTURE DEVELOPMENT When comparing the recurrence rate and overall complication rate and symptoms relief, surgery was not inferior to endovenous procedures. Reported follow up periods for the endovenous procedures were relatively short.
At Least Two Origins of Fungicide Resistance in Grapevine Downy Mildew Populations

ABSTRACT Quinone outside inhibiting (QoI) fungicides represent one of the most widely used groups of fungicides used to control agriculturally important fungal pathogens. They inhibit the cytochrome bc1 complex of mitochondrial respiration. Soon after their introduction onto the market in 1996, QoI fungicide-resistant isolates were detected in field plant pathogen populations of a large range of species. However, there is still little understanding of the processes driving the development of QoI fungicide resistance in plant pathogens. In particular, it is unknown whether fungicide resistance occurs independently in isolated populations or if it appears once and then spreads globally by migration. Here, we provide the first case study of the evolutionary processes that lead to the emergence of QoI fungicide resistance in the plant pathogen Plasmopara viticola. Sequence analysis of the complete cytochrome b gene showed that all resistant isolates carried a mutation resulting in the replacement of glycine by alanine at codon 143 (G143A). Phylogenetic analysis of a large mitochondrial DNA fragment including the cytochrome b gene (2,281 bp) across a wide range of European P. viticola isolates allowed the detection of four major haplotypes belonging to two distinct clades, each of which contains a different QoI fungicide resistance allele. This is the first demonstration that a selected substitution conferring resistance to a fungicide has occurred several times in a plant-pathogen system. Finally, a high population structure was found when the frequency of QoI fungicide resistance haplotypes was assessed in 17 French vineyards, indicating that pathogen populations might be under strong directional selection for local adaptation to fungicide pressure.
Rapid activation of ERK by 6‐hydroxydopamine promotes survival of dopaminergic cells

Isoforms of the mitogen‐activated protein kinase ERK have been implicated in both cell survival and cell death. In the present study we explored their role in cell viability in response to oxidative stress. Using the dopaminergic MN9D cell line, we determined that cell death occurred in a concentration‐dependent manner after exposure to 6‐hydroxydopamine (6‐OHDA). The toxicity of 6‐OHDA was mediated through generation of reactive oxygen species and was accompanied by a large increase in phosphorylated ERK1/2 but no significant increase in phosphorylated ERK5. 6‐OHDA produced a distinct temporal pattern of ERK1/2 activation, with phosphorylated ERK1/2 peaks occurring after 10–15 min (25‐fold increase) and 6–24 hr (13‐fold increase). Inhibition of the early phosphorylated ERK1/2 peak with U0126 increased the generation of reactive oxygen species by 6‐OHDA as well as 6‐OHDA‐induced toxicity, whereas inhibition of the late peak did not affect 6‐OHDA‐induced cell death. The time course of phosphorylation of the prosurvival protein CREB mimicked the temporal profile of ERK1/2 activation after 6‐OHDA, and blocking the early phospho‐ERK1/2 peak also abolished CREB activation. In contrast, activation of caspase‐3 by 6‐OHDA was delayed, occurring after about 6 hr, and this activation was increased by inhibition of the first phosphorylated ERK1/2 peak. These results suggest that the rapid activation of ERK1/2 in dopaminergic cells by oxidative stress serves as a self‐protective response, reducing the content of reactive oxygen species and caspase‐3 activity and increasing downstream ERK1/2 substrates. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Reactivation of latent herpes simplex virus by adenovirus recombinants encoding mutant IE-0 gene products

We have previously shown that adenovirus recombinants expressing functional ICP0 reactivate latent herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) in an in vitro latency system. This study demonstrated that ICP0, independent of other HSV gene products, is sufficient to reactivate latent HSV-2 in this in vitro system. To assess the effects of defined mutations in the sequence encoding ICP0 (IE-0) on reactivation, seven in-frame insertion and three in-frame deletion mutants were moved into an adenovirus expression vector. Each recombinant directed the synthesis of stable ICP0 of the correct size. The transactivation activity of the mutated sequences in these recombinants was similar to that when they were tested in plasmids. When these recombinants were examined for their ability to reactivate in the in vitro latency system, mutants with dramatic defects in transactivation (Ad-0/125, Ad-0/89, Ad-0/2/7, and Ad-0/88/93) were unable to reactivate latent HSV-2 independent of the multiplicity of infection. An exception to this correlation was the finding that Ad-0/89, which transactivated poorly, was able to reactivate latent virus after prolonged incubation whereas other transactivation-deficient mutants could not. Moreover, the presence of ICP4 did not compensate for the inability of any of the recombinants tested to reactivate HSV-2. These results show that (i) the transactivation domains of ICP0 are also used in reactivation, (ii) the presence of another essential HSV regulatory protein ICP4 does not alter the pattern of reactivation by ICP0, and (iii) mutations in some regions of IE-0 previously shown to affect viral growth and plaque formation did not alter its ability to reactivate in this in vitro system.
Mutually Exclusive T-Cell Receptor Induction and Differential Susceptibility to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Mutational Escape Associated with a Two-Amino-Acid Difference between HLA Class I Subtypes

ABSTRACT The relative contributions of HLA alleles and T-cell receptors (TCRs) to the prevention of mutational viral escape are unclear. Here, we examined human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-specific CD8+ T-cell responses restricted by two closely related HLA class I alleles, B*5701 and B*5703, that differ by two amino acids but are both associated with a dominant response to the same HIV-1 Gag epitope KF11 (KAFSPEVIPMF). When this epitope is presented by HLA-B*5701, it induces a TCR repertoire that is highly conserved among individuals, cross-recognizes viral epitope variants, and is rarely associated with mutational escape. In contrast, KF11 presented by HLA-B*5703 induces an entirely different, more heterogeneous TCR β-chain repertoire that fails to recognize specific KF11 escape variants which frequently arise in clade C-infected HLA-B*5703+ individuals. These data show the influence of HLA allele subtypes on TCR selection and indicate that extensive TCR diversity is not a prerequisite to prevention of allowable viral mutations.
Efficient Integration of Transgenes and Their Reliable Expression in Human Embryonic Stem Cells

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are promising materials for both basic and applied research fields such as human developmental biology and drug discovery because of their capacity for long-term self-renewal and differentiation into virtually all types of cells and tissues (Thomson et al., 1998; Hoffman & Carpenter, 2005). For example, with regard to their applications for drug development research, these cells can be used test whether drugs under development are efficacious against specific diseases by using hESCs-derived disease models which show disease phenotypes (Barbaric et al., 2010; Laustriat et al., 2010). Genetic manipulation is a useful strategy for generating cellular disease models. Random integration of exogenous genes into the genome of hESCs is the most straightforward and easiest method. Random integration, however, often results in inactivation or silencing of integrated genes in hESCs (Ellis, 2005; Liew et al., 2007; Xia et al., 2007) and also might alter the cellular phenotypes due to insertional mutagenesis, which disrupts gene functions in undefined gene regions (Hacein-Bey-Abina et al., 2003; Nienhuis et al., 2006). Furthermore, the reliability of data may be compromised by differences in the transgene integration sites when comparing multiple transgenic cell lines. Introducing transgenes by gene targeting is one way to avoid undesired gene silencing and insertional mutagenesis, but the targeting efficiency in hESCs is notoriously low (Zwaka and Thomson, 2003; Urbach et al, 2004; Irion et al, 2007; Di Domenico et al, 2008; Ruby et al, 2009). Therefore, a lot of time and effort may be required to obtain gene-targeted hESC clones. To address these issues, several strategies have been explored. Researchers have identified usable native sites for gene integration in the human genome. Bacteriophage phiC31 integrase, or adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), can mediate plasmid integration into pseudo-attP sites or the adeno-associated virus integration site 1 locus in the genome, respectively (Thyagarajan et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2008). However, the human genome possesses 23 different pseudo-attP sites, so the integration site cannot be specifically controlled, and the AAV2-mediated targeting efficiency is still low (4.16%). In contrast, foreign sequences such as bacterial loxP and yeast FRT are useful for gene integrations into the genome. Both loxP and lox2272 sequences can
Fast adaptation model reference adaptive control

Since adaptive controller does not rely fully on dynamic system models, therefore, there exist a necessity of fast adaptation to achieve improved tracking performance using high adaptive gain. However, attaining fast adaptation using high adaptive gain is a serious limitation of adaptive controllers which may raise certain serious issues. First, it causes large frequency excursions and bursting in the control signal. Second, the differential equation of adaptive law becomes stiff and causes numerical instability. Third, it makes the adaptive system less robust towards uncertainties and unmodelled dynamics. To address these issues of fast adaptation, a new adaptive law based on non-quadratic Lyapunov function is proposed in this paper. A modified form of the proposed adaptive law is also suggested for performance improvement. Through simulation studies, it has been demonstrated that for high adaptive gain, differential equation of the proposed adaptive law does not become stiff. Computational time and number of iterations required to solve the differential equation reducedto a great extent. The control signal is also in the low-frequency range. The Effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated using simulations of a numerical example.
D- and q-axis inductance calculation of IPMSM using approximate analytical model

This paper presents a new lumped parameter method (LPM) to capture nonlinear magnetic behavior of interior permanent magnet synchronous machines (IPMSM). Firstly, the nonlinear B-H curve is modeled as a mathematical expression using Matlab curve fitting toolbox. Using the geometry of the machine, the flux density B versus magnetic field intensity relation is transformed to flux versus MMF relation. By using an approximation for the flux-MMF relation, d- and q-axis equivalent circuits are obtained. Then the nonlinear equations are solved using perturbation theory without any iteration. Finally, perturbation series are converted to rational series using Pade approximant to ensure convergence. As a result, d- and q-axis inductance are obtained as a function of the current.
FACTORS INFLUENCING STUDENTS' DECISIONS IN CHOOSING PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA: A STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELLING APPROACH

There are almost 500 institutions of private higher education currently in operation in Malaysia, these include colleges, university colleges and universities. These institutions are helpful because they fill the gap caused by limited seating for potential students in government institutions of higher learning. A total sample of 373 students comprising students from secondary schools was used in this study. These students were in the British equivalent O and A levels of education. A questionnaire containing 46 statements was distributed randomly to the respondents during a motivation seminar at their respective schools. The data analysis was conducted using SPSS and AMOS software programme packages for Windows. Factor analysis was performed to extract and decide on the number of factors underlying the measured variables of interest. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was then used to examine the variables and the fitness of the proposed model. The results indicate a substantial positive effect of perception and promotion on the students' choice of private institutions for higher education. The results also reveal a significant positive effect of perception on influence and promotion on influence. Therefore, the findings of this study have a substantial effect on private institutions of higher education.
Robust Interference Mitigation Against Channel Uncertainty for MIMO Cognitive Radios

This paper studies robust interference mitigation against the imperfectness of channel knowledge involved in the interference link of a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) system that coexists with a primary radio (PR) system via opportunistic spectrum-sharing (OSS) scheme. The robust design leads to a seemingly complicated matrix-valued problem. Nevertheless, we show that it can be equivalently converted into two convex semidefinite programs (SDPs). One of them is identified as a null-forcing approach with closed-form power allocation, and the other can be reduced to a convex scalar power allocation subproblem by properly relaxing the interference constraint. Numerical results demonstrate significant performance gain of the robust design over previous nonrobust strategies.
Evolution of cell‐mediated antitumor immunity in mice bearing a syngeneic chemically induced tumor. Influence of tumor growth, surgical removal and treatment with irradiated tumor cells

The evolution of the specific cell‐mediated immune status was studied in C57BL/6 mice bearing a chemically induced syngeneic sarcoma, the TBL CL2 tumor. Peritoneal cells (PC) as the source of immunocompetent cells were repeatedly harvested from the same groups of mice checked in the in vitro colony growth inhibition tests (CGI) against target TBL CL2 cells.
Action-centric Polar Representation of Motion Trajectories for Online Action Recognition

This work introduces a novel action descriptor that represents activities instantaneously in each frame of a video sequence for action recognition. The proposed approach first characterizes the video by computing kinematic primitives along trajectories obtained by semi-dense point tracking in the video. Then, a frame level characterization is achieved by computing a spatial action-centric polar representation from the computed tra-jectories. This representation aims at quantifying the image space and grouping the trajectories within radial and angular regions. Motion histograms are then temporally aggregated in each region to form a kinematic signature from the current trajectories. Histograms with several time depths can be computed to obtain different motion characterization versions. These motion histograms are updated at each time, to reflect the kinematic trend of trajectories in each region. The action descriptor is then defined as the collection of motion histograms from all the regions in a specific frame. Classic support vector machine (SVM) models are used to carry out the classification according to each time depth. The proposed approach is easy to implement, very fast and the representation is consistent to code a broad variety of actions thanks to a multi-level representation of motion primitives. The proposed approach was evaluated on different public action datasets showing competitive results (94% and 88.7% of accuracy are achieved in KTH and UT datasets, respectively), and an efficient computation time.
Using Word and Phrase Abbreviation Patterns to Extract Age From Twitter Microtexts

The wealth of texts available publicly online for analysis is ever increasing. Much work in computational linguistics focuses on syntactic, contextual, morphological and phonetic analysis on written documents, vocal recordings, or texts on the internet. Twitter messages present a unique challenge for computational linguistic analysis due to their constrained size. The constraint of 140 characters often prompts users to abbreviate words and phrases. Additionally, as an informal writing medium, messages are not expected to adhere to grammatically or orthographically standard English. As such, Twitter messages are noisy and do not necessarily conform to standard writing conventions of linguistic corpora, often requiring special pre-processing before advanced analysis can be done. In the area of computational linguistics, there is an interest in determining latent attributes of an author. Attributes such as author gender can be determined with some amount of success from many sources, using various methods, such as analysis of shallow linguistic patterns or topic. Author age is more difficult to determine, but previous research has been somewhat successful at classifying age as a binary (e.g. over or under 30), ternary, or even as a continuous variable using various techniques. Twitter messages present a difficult problem for latent user attribute analysis, due to the preprocessing necessary for many computational linguistics analysis tasks. An added logistical challenge is that very few latent attributes are explicitly defined by users on Twitter. Twitter messages are a part of an enormous data set, but the data set must be independently annotated for latent writer attributes not defined through the Twitter API before any classification on such attributes can be done. The actual classification problem is another particular challenge due to restrictions on tweet length. Previous work has shown that word and phrase abbreviation patterns used on Twitter can be indicative of some latent user attributes, such as geographic region or the Twitter client (iPhone, Android, Twitter website, etc.) used to make posts. This study explores if there there are agerelated patterns or change in those patterns over time evident in Twitter posts from a variety of English language authors. This work presents a growable data set annotated by Twitter users themselves for age and other useful attributes. The study also presents an extension of prior work on Twitter abbreviation patterns which shows that word and phrase abbreviation patterns can be used toward determining user age. Notable results include classification accuracy of up to 82.6%, which was 66.8% above relative majority class baseline (ZeroR in Weka) when classifying user ages into 10 equally sized age bins using a support vector machine classifier and PCA extracted features.
Quantification of skeletal muscle mitochondrial function by 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy techniques: a quantitative review

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can give information about cellular metabolism in vivo which is difficult to obtain in other ways. In skeletal muscle, non‐invasive 31P MRS measurements of the post‐exercise recovery kinetics of pH, [PCr], [Pi] and [ADP] contain valuable information about muscle mitochondrial function and cellular pH homeostasis in vivo, but quantitative interpretation depends on understanding the underlying physiology. Here, by giving examples of the analysis of 31P MRS recovery data, by some simple computational simulation, and by extensively comparing data from published studies using both 31P MRS and invasive direct measurements of muscle O2 consumption in a common analytical framework, we consider what can be learnt quantitatively about mitochondrial metabolism in skeletal muscle using MRS‐based methodology. We explore some technical and conceptual limitations of current methods, and point out some aspects of the physiology which are still incompletely understood.
Measurement and analysis of radiated emissions from coupled UAV and smart RFIC objects

In this paper, we present experimental characterization and analysis of radiated emissions from coupled UAV and smart RFIC Objects (smartphones) in presence of noisy interferers. Spectral and spatial Near-Field responses of radiated emissions from coupled Motor (UAV) and Circuit (smartphones) are extracted. Analysis of radiated emissions based on Energy density and Entropy considerations are proposed. Wavelet Multi-Resolution approach is introduced for the simultaneous Time-Frequency identification and localization of stochastic noisy sources.