Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Healthy donor derived IL-10 producing influenza virus M1-specific CD4 T cells encompass FOXP3+ and FOXP3-T-regulatory cells as a consequence of previous acute infection

Control and termination of an infection with Influenza A virus is associated with IL-10 production in mouse models. IL-10 plays an essential role in dampening virus-specific immune responses in order to limit collateral damage. Virus-specific CD4+ T cells are an important source of IL-10. This study investigated whether the population of IL-10 producing influenza-specific CD4+ T cells comprised of regulatory T cells (Treg) as they are potent suppressors of the adaptive immune response. Influenza-specific IL-10 producing T cells were detected in all human donors displaying influenza-specific immunity. Isolation of Matrix 1 protein-specific IL-10 producing T-cell clones revealed that a substantial proportion of the IL-10 producing T-cell clones displayed the capacity to suppress the proliferation of effector cells, functionally identifying them as Tregs. Both FOXP3+ and FOXP3- CD4+ Tregs were isolated and all were able to exert their suppressive capacity when stimulated with their cognate antigen, including influenza virus-infected APC. The isolated Tregs suppressed the IL-2 production of influenza-specific T-helper cells as well as prevented the upregulation of the high-affinity IL-2 receptor on CD8 effector cells. As these influenza-specific Tregs can dampen the immune response by interfering at both sides of the IL-2 regulatory pathway they may be crucial in preventing immunopathology, which otherwise results from an exuberant immune response after acute influenza infection.
WORK FROM HOME AND EMPLOYEES' PERFORMANCE DURING COVID19 OUTBREAK: ROLE OF TIME AND COMMUNICATION CULTURES

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of telecommuting on "In Role Performance (IRP) and Extra Role Performance (ERP) of employees" and the research has also examined the moderating effect of "Polychronic Time Culture (PTC) vs Monochronic Time Culture MTC" and "High Context Culture (HCC) vs low context culture (LCC) on the relationship between teleworking and IRP and ERP, whether these factors moderate the relationship or not. The quantitative approach is used for this study. Data is collected through the online survey method, where 312 teleworkers of the telecommunication sector respond to the questionnaire. The collected information is tested using SPSS and AMOS by using confirmative factor analysis and structural equation modelling. This study's findings show that teleworking had a significant impact on the IRP and ERP of employees. Time cultures also had a significant moderating impact on the relationship between teleworking and In-role performance and employees' extra-role performance. In contrast, HCC vs LCC had an insignificant moderating impact on the relationship between teleworking and IRP of the employees, and it significantly influences the ERP of employees. This research has been conducted only in the telecommunication sector of Pakistan. Furthermore, this research focused only on two dimensions of Hall's cultural model; future research can use the national cultural model's other dimensions. This study gives several insights into how employees and organizations can be encouraged to work from home according to the organisation's standards. It also enables the organization to motivate employees to EERP while working from home.
MOLECULAR TYPING OF RICKETTSIA AKARI

Rickettsia akari , an obligately intracellular bacterium, is the causative agent of the cosmopolitan urban disease rickettsialpox. R. akari is an atypical representative of spotted fever group rickettsiae (SFG) as it is associated with rodent mites rather than ticks or fleas; however, only limited information is available about the degree of genetic variability found among isolates of R. akari . We examined 13 isolates of R. akari from humans, rodents and mites in the USA, the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia made between 1946 and 2003 for diversity in their tandem repeat regions (TR) and intergenic regions (IGR). The 1.23 Mb genome of R. akari strain Hartford CWPP was analyzed using Tandem Repeat Finder software (http://tandem.bu.edu) and 374 different TRs were identified, with size variation from 1 to 483 bp and with TR copy numbers ranging between 21 and 1.9, respectively. No size polymorphisms were detected among the 11 TR regions examined from 5 open reading frames and 6 IGR. Eighteen non-TR IGR’s were amplified and sequenced for the same isolates comprising a total of 5.995 bp (0.49%) of the Hartford CWPP strain chromosome. Three single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites were detected in two IGR’s which permitted separation of the five R. akari isolates from Ukraine SSR from the other eight isolates. In conclusion, this is the first study reporting genetic heterogeneity among R. akari isolates of different geographic origins. Further exploration of this genetic diversity is needed to understand bet-ter the geographic distribution of R. akari and the epidemiology of rickettsialpox. The potential of mites as hosts for other rickettsial agents also needs further investigation.
Towards Virtualization in Cloud Computing

: Cloud computing is a model for easy access upon request network which can be configured to a set of computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, services, and applications). It can be provided upon request with lowest labour and without the meddling of the user. Of serious problems faced by IT managers is Excessive number of single-purpose server hardware. The main reason for the increasing number of such hardware is incompatible applications which are running on different servers. As a result, system administrators prefer to run applications on separate servers. It imposes additional cost for service providers and users. In this paper, we discuss about the utilization of virtualization for server consolidation and to reduce the overall cost and reducing the number of servers.
Compressive ultrafast pulse measurement via time-domain single-pixel imaging: supplement

JIAPENG ZHAO,1,∗ JIANMING DAI,2 BORIS BRAVERMAN,3 XI-CHENG ZHANG,1 AND ROBERT W. BOYD1,3 1The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA 2Center for Terahertz Waves and School of Precision Instruments & Opto-Electronics Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China 3Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa K1N 6N5, Canada ∗Corresponding author: jzhao24@ur.rochester. edu
Loneliness among Older People in Hospitals: A Comparative Study between Single Rooms and MultiBedded Wards to Evaluate Current Health Service within the Same Organisation

Background: Healthcare design professionals and new hospital design policies favor single rooms over traditional Multi-Bedded Wards (MB-W) for greater dignity, personalized care and infection control. Higher incidence of inpatient falls has been reported in single rooms but an impact on the perceived isolation and loneliness is not very well studied. Objective: To compare perceived loneliness among older people treated in single rooms and Multi-Bedded Wards (MB-W) within the same organization. Design: A semi-structured interview was conducted to measure medical co- morbidities, functional status, social activity and cognitive function. Validated scales: Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) were used to measure anxiety/depression in the both the hospital sites and perceived loneliness was measured using validated three-point loneliness scale both as in-patient and in the community before admission to the hospital. Setting: Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr (YYF), a hospital with 100% single rooms, and the Royal Gwent Hospital (RGH), with MB-W. Both are under the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board (ABUHB). 50 patients aged 65 and over admitted to each site with an acute medical illness, recovering and able to give informed consent were included. Only patients with severe dementia, delirium or receiving palliative treatment were excluded. Results: There was no significant difference in the 3-point loneliness score in the community (MB-W=4.16±1.55; single-rooms=3.66±1.39, p=0.9). But patients felt more lonely in single rooms (4.48±2.10) as compared to MB-W (3.72±1.14) and this was significantly higher (p=0.02). Furthermore, following the hospital admission, older people felt less isolated and lonely in MB-W and felt lonelier in single rooms and this was significantly different. Conclusion: In this study, patients admitted to single-rooms reported significantly higher loneliness as compared to MB-W. Loneliness increased significantly following the admission to single room as compared to the pre-admission level. We recommend that impact of isolation in older people should be taken into consideration in deciding the percentage of single rooms in the new hospital design.
The Effect of Moving Direction on the Dragging Task Performance of a Gaze Control Device

Objective: This study aims to investigate the effects of moving direction on the dragging task performance of a gaze control device (eye mouse). Background: Eye mouse is developed and utilized for disabled people as an alternative input device to control computers instead of a conventional mouse. Nevertheless, its usability has been investigated insufficiently. Method: Total of twenty seven subjects participated in the experiment and performed dragging tasks by eye mouse under given stimulus as target position and moving direction varied. Results: The result in order of performance level by movement variation follows: diagonal movement, horizontal movement, and vertical movement in highest to lowest order. In detail, the horizontal movement in upper part showed higher performance compared to the horizontal movement in lower part. Conclusion: The result in terms of efficiency can be applied in establishment of guidelines for eye mouse development such as interface and control design. Future studies on the effectiveness respect to more complex variables such as approach angle or displacement may potentially derive the impact and correlations among effectiveness and other variables. Application: Also, it is expected to deliver higher level of performance by eye mouse as a new interface design based on the results of this study.
Twoâ•’step mutual informationâ•’based stereo matching

A fast mutual information (MI) based stereo matching method is proposed that estimates the optimal intensity transfer function in a Bayesian framework. Previous MI-based stereo matching methods require several iterations, where each iteration includes both data cost computation and global energy optimisation such as dynamic programming and graph-cuts. These computations are redundant and time-consuming. In this Letter, a fast two-step MI-based stereo matching method by combining local feature correspondences and global statistics constraints is proposed. Experimental results show that the method is fast, yet generates results comparable with the original MI-based method.
MicroRNA-146a as a Prognostic Biomarker for Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background and Aims: MicroRNAs including miR146a have a regulatory role on the expression of genes and act with binding to 3 ʹ -UTR region of the genes. Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is involved in carcinogenesis as an in ﬂ ammatory marker, and microRNA-146a (miR-146a) as a negative regulatory factor. We aimed to evaluate miR146a expression as a prognostic or diagnostic biomarker for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and also an association between miR146a and COX2 expression. Materials and Methods: We quanti ﬁ ed the level of miR-146a and COX-2 expression in cancerous and adjacent normal tissue samples obtained from 34 patients with ESCC, using real-time – PCR. Statistical analyses were conducted using one-sample t -test. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve and Kaplan – Meier analysis were applied to assay miR146a as a diagnostic and prognostic marker, respectively, during 4 years of the study. Furthermore, the Cox regression model was performed to assay the hazard ratio (HR). The association between miR-146a and COX2 expression level in ESCC patients was evaluated by nonparametric Spearman ’ s rho analysis. Results: The results revealed a reduction of miR-146a expression in 50% of cancerous tissue when compared with adjacent normal regions ( P- value=0.127). COX-2 expression in 80% of ESCC patients was higher than in the controls ( P- value=0.001). Overall, in 60% of cases, direct association was seen between microRNA-146a and COX-2 expression level (correlation coef ﬁ cient= 0.438, P- value=0.011). COX2 can be considered as a diagnostic biomarker (AUC=0.834, sensitivity=72%, speci ﬁ city =83%, P -value<0.0001) but miR146a cannot be considered as a diagnostic biomarker (AUC=0.553, sensitivity=88%, speci ﬁ city =28%, P -value=0.453). Survival analysis by Kaplan – Meier method showed miR146a and COX2 expression can be probably considered as prognostic biomarkers for ESCC because patients with high expression of miR146a had 7 months shorter life span and patients with low expression of COX2 had 8 months shorter life span. Conclusion: COX2 expression is a diagnostic biomarker. MiR-146a and COX2 expression can probably be considered as prognostic biomarkers for survival in ESCC. relative to the expression of GAPDH in tumor and normal tissues, using 2 − ΔΔ Ct formula. 30
The determinants of teacher effectiveness in Portuguese schools

This work project analyses the impact of teachers on student exam scores and the determinants of teacher effectiveness in Portuguese schools. The main findings are that teachers are an important component of student achievement and that unobservable characteristics explain most differences in teacher quality. Having a master’s degree has no impact on teacher quality. Unlike their female counterparts male teachers exhibit losses in their teaching effectiveness over the years. We also find positive and significant peer effects between teachers.
by Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for degree of in in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO

2 DISCUSSION . 3 CONCLUSIONS . 9 REFERENCES . 13 The structural basis for activation of voltage sensor domains in an ion channel TPC1 . 19 ABSTRACT . 20. 20 INTRODUCTION . 21 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION . 24 METHODS . 44 REFERENCES . 58 Rapid screening of antibody fragments from recombinant phage display libraries using negative stain electron microscopy . 66 ABSTRACT . 67. 67 INTRODUCTION . 68 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION . 69 CONCLUSIONS . 72 METHODS . 77 REFERENCES . 78
Amyloid β chaperone ‐ Lipocalin ‐ type Prostaglandin D synthase acts as a peroxidase in the presence of heme

The extracellular transporter, Lipocalin ‐ type Prostaglandin D synthase (L ‐ PGDS) binds to heme and heme metabolites with high affinity. It has been reported that L ‐ PGDS protects neuronal cells against apoptosis induced by exposure to hydrogen peroxide. Our study demonstrates that when human WT L ‐ PGDS is in complex with heme, it exhibits a strong peroxidase activity thus behaving as a pseudo ‐ peroxidase. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) studies confirm that heme in the L ‐ PGDS ‐ heme complex is hexacoordinated with high ‐ spin Fe (III). NMR titration of heme in L ‐ PGDS points to hydrophobic interaction between heme and several residues within the β‐ barrel cavity of L ‐ PGDS. In addition to the transporter function, L ‐ PGDS is a key amyloid ‐β chaperone in human cerebrospinal fluid. The presence of high levels of bilirubin and its derivatives, implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), by binding to L ‐ PGDS may reduce its chaperone activity. Nevertheless, our ThT binding assay establishes that heme and heme metabolites do not significantly alter the neuroprotective chaperone function of L ‐ PGDS. Guided by NMR data we reconstructed the heme L ‐ PGDS complex using extensive MD simulations providing a platform for mechanistic interpretation of the catalytic and transporting functions and their modulation by secondary ligands like Abeta peptides and heme metabolites.
Geochemical and geophysical constrains on the dynamic topography of the <fc>S</fc>outhern <fc>A</fc>frican <fc>P</fc>lateau

The deep mantle African Superswell is considered to contribute to the topographic uplift of the Southern African Plateau, but dynamic support estimates vary wildly depending on the approach and data used. One reason for these large disparities is that the role of lithospheric structure, key in modulating deep dynamic contributions to elevation, is commonly ignored or oversimplified in convection studies. We use multiple high-quality geophysical data coupled with xenolith-based geochemical constraints to compute the isostatic lithospheric contribution to the elevation of the Plateau, facilitating isolation of the current dynamic component from the total observed elevation. We employ a multiobservable stochastic algorithm to invert geoid anomaly, surface-wave dispersion data, magnetotelluric data, and surface heat flow to predict elevation in a fully thermodynamically and internally-consistent manner. We find that a compositionally layered 230 6 7 km thick lithosphere is required to simultaneously fit all four data types, in agreement with abundant independent xenolith evidence. Our stochastic modeling indicates a lithospheric contribution to elevation of the order of 670 m, which implies dynamic support arising from the convecting sublithospheric mantle of 650 m. Our results have important implications for the understanding of lithospheric-deep mantle feedback mechanisms and for calibrating dynamic topography estimates from global convection studies. Plain Language Summary Is the Kaapvaal Craton too high? Yes is the short answer. Its elevation cannot be sustained by the lithosphere of the craton itself, therefore there must be support from beneath the base of the lithosphere, so-called dynamic topography. We show through very careful modelling of the Kaapvaal Craton lithosphere that alone it can support an elevation of the order of 670 m, therefore the other approx. 650 m must come from mantle processes beneath the base of the lithosphere.
Photon-echo quantum memory with efficient multipulse readings (16 pages)

We present a photon-echo quantum memory technique for manipulating quantum states of photons interacting with an atomic gas medium. The technique offers vast potential for the complete nonlocal-in-time multipulse reconstruction of a stored light as a superposition of echo fields, irradiated from the medium at different moments of time. Using this technique the dynamic control of quantum states is effectively possible by simply varying the laser parameters.
On benchmarking and choosing a cloud

The introduction of the cloud changes the way we look upon data and computations. It is no longer clear what "our system" is or if data is really "our data" as it isn’t stored on our own disks and computations are not performed on our own processors. While this shift brings many benefits, there are also problems. Questions regarding performance variation, security, loss of control, data and code lock-in etcetera are still a concern. As such, any cloud deployment carries a certain risk. In order to better understand this risk customers have to evaluate various cloud providers from a multitude of angles, which is a time consuming and difficult task. In this report we show how a public cloud can be evaluated and benchmarked for a number of key parameters by first assessing how a number of common workloads fare in a cloud setting and then by performing a technical benchmark of Windows Azure and Amazon EC2. Discussions regarding the non-technical aspects to a cloud are also provided. Lastly, a real world situation in which a medium sized organization chose a cloud provider is examined and analyzed. One of the key findings from the technical evaluation, aside from the actual benchmarking results, was that it is not possible to perform a time and effort efficient evaluation of a cloud platform. We find that as the task of cloud evaluation is so complex and costly, most cloud customers are likely to choose platform based on non-technical factors only, such as costs and general preferences. We believe this to be a potentially harmful development. Regarding workloads, we found that security-critical and computationally intensive applications don’t do well in a cloud setting. However, applications which utilize scalability or need to be geographically spread can find the cloud to suit their needs very well. Generally, workloads that are of a sensitive nature or requires serious performance should avoid the cloud for now. In conclusion, we believe that much work needs to be done in order to ease the process of evaluating and choosing cloud platform. There is a lack of openness and standardization which is hurting both business and customers. Considering the many benefits that cloud computing brings, such as scalability and low price; we also think that if these issues were properly dealt with, cloud computing has the potential to truly transform the way we consume and develop programs and data to the better.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Physics Division

In this paper, we present a fast technique for computing both paths of minimal cost, and minimal geodesics on surfaces. The technique exploits the fast marching method introduced in [15, 16] for solving the Eikonal equation and its extension to general static Hamiltonian-Jacobi equations given in [1]. The solution to the appropriate static Hamiltonian provides the arrival time of the shortest path, and is then coupled to high order ordinary differential equation solvers to construct the path itself. The resulting technique is an O(N log N) procedure, where N is the total number of grid points. The technique works without change in any number of space dimensions. We provide upwind approximation schemes for the relevant Hamiltonian, and a series of examples of the construction of such geodesics, as well as additional comments about the use of such schemes in computing general distance maps and shape-offsetting.
D YNAMIC P ROBABILISTIC P RUNING : T RAINING SPARSE NETWORKS BASED ON STOCHASTIC AND DYNAMIC MASKING

Deep Learning (DL) models are known to be heavily over-parametrized, resulting in a large memory footprint and power consumption. This hampers the use of such models in hardware-constrained edge technologies such as wearables and mobile devices. Model compression during training can be achieved by promoting sparse network structures both through weight regularization and by leveraging dynamic pruning methods. State-of-the-art pruning methods are however mostly magnitudebased which impedes their use in e.g. binary settings. Importantly, most of the pruning methods do not provide a structural sparsity, resulting in inefficient memory allocation and access for hardware implementations. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic pruning solution that we term Dynamic Probabilistic Pruning (DPP). DPP leverages Gumbel top-K sampling to select subsets of weights during training, which enables exploring which weights are most relevant. Our approach allows for setting an explicit per-neuron layer-wise sparsity level and structural pruning across weights and feature maps, without relying on weight magnitude heuristics. Relevantly, our method generates a hardware-oriented structural sparsity for fully-connected and convolutional layers that facilitates memory allocation and access, in contrast with conventional unstructured pruning. We show that DPP achieves competitive sparsity levels and classification accuracy on MNIST and CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 datasets compared to a state-of-the-art baseline for various DL architectures while respecting per-neuron sparsity constraints.