Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
4 Mechanisms of Cell Death in the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies

The transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) constitute a family of fatal, neurodegenerative diseases, including scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and a range of human disorders, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), kuru and fatal familial insomnia. The archetypal TSE disease is scrapie of sheep and goats, which has been present in the UK flock for over 200 years as a result of both horizontal and vertical transmission. The most prevalent TSE disease of humans is sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (spCJD), which affects 1-3 individuals per million worldwide. A new form of CJD, known as variant CJD (vCJD), was diagnosed in humans in the mid 1990s and it is likely that vCJD was contracted by consumption of contaminated beef, since this disease is indistinguishable from BSE on transmission to a panel of mice (Bruce et al., 1997). To date, there have been 175 cases of vCJD in the UK and a further 49 cases across 11 other countries (www.eurocjd.ed.ac.uk, data correct as of Aug 2011).
Multi-objective design optimization of a frontal crash energy absorption system for a road-safe vehicle

Since 2013, more than 1.25 million people die each year in road accidents, making road safety a global concern. With regard to protection in frontal and rear collisions, a common solution is to use a structure designed to deform in a controlled manner in the event of collision, avoiding deformation of the cabin and excessive accelerations in the passengers, which can lead to serious injuries or even fatalities. This work focus on the development of an aluminum structure of this type, aiming for an optimized design, within the design parameters available for the vehicle project in which it is included. A Finite Element Analysis (FEA) model of the frontal energy absorption structure for frontal impact is developed and validated with a quasi-static compression experimental procedure. A multi-objective optimization process, that can be adaptable to the future needs of the project, is developed. Several changes in the geometry are tested, focusing on specific deficits in the performance of the structure. Through this process, a robust and adaptable FEA model is achieved and a compilation of the influence of several parameters on the impact performance is obtained. The optimized structure shows a significant performance improvement in the event of a frontal collision and, according to the established limits, it is expected to satisfy the legal values of safety in the tests carried out by the responsible entities.
THE ROLE OF RACE IN YOUNG BIRACIAL ADULTS ’ IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ; EXPLORING IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSRACIAL ADOPTIONS

INTRODUCTION This article draws on the insights of research on nine Indian-White biracial young adults, and applies those insights to the transracial adoption debate. It thus does not report research on transracial adoption directly, but enters the debate on transracial adoption through using insights on the process of racial identity construction that challenge some assumptions prominent in the debate.
DUALISING INTUITIONISTIC NEGATION

One of Da Costa's motives when he constructed the paraconsistent logic Cw was to dualise the negation of intuitionistic logic. In this paper I explore a different way of going about this task. A logic is defined by taking the Kripke semantics for intuitionistic logic, and dualising the truth conditions for negation. Various properties of the logic are established, including its relation to CWo Tableau and natural deduction systems for the logic are produced, as are appropriate algebraic structures. The paper then investigates dualising the intuitionistic conditional in the same way. This establishes various connections between the logic, and a logic called in the literature 'Brouwerian logic' or 'closed-set logic'.
Downregulation of lncRNA H 19 inhibits migration and invasion of human osteosarcoma through the NF-κ B pathway

The present study aimed to investigate the role of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) H19 in the development of osteosarcoma and to determine the underlying mechanism involved. A total of 40 patients with osteosarcoma were selected and the expression level of H19 in tumor tissue and adjacent healthy tissue was detected by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Survival curves were plotted using the Kaplan-Meier method to investigate the prognostic value of H19 expression level for patients with osteosarcoma. H19 knockdown osteosarcoma cell lines were constructed using small interfering (si)RNA transfection. Cell migration and invasion abilities were measured by Transwell migration and invasion assays, respectively. Western blot analysis was performed to detect the expression levels of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K), phospho (p)-PI3K, RAC-alpha serine/threonine-protein kinase (AKT), p-AKT and NF-κB inhibitor α (IκBα) in osteosarcoma cells transfected with H19 siRNA. Expression level of H19 was significantly elevated in tumor tissue compared with adjacent healthy tissue. Expression level of H19 was positively associated with distant metastasis of osteosarcoma (P<0.01), but not with gender and age. Overall survival of patients with osteosarcoma with high H19 level was significantly shorter compared with patients with low H19 expression (P<0.05). H19 knockdown significantly reduced migration and invasion ability of osteosarcoma cells. Significantly decreased levels of p-PI3K and p-AKT, and elevated level of IκBα were observed in H19 knockdown osteosarcoma cells compared with control osteosarcoma cells, while no significant differences in levels of PI3K and AKT were observed. Therefore, the present study demonstrated that knockdown of lncRNA H19 can inhibit migration and invasion of human osteosarcoma cells by inhibiting the nuclear factor-κB pathway.
TERTIARY EDUCATION SYSTEM IN SLOVAKIA 1995 TERTIARY EDUCATION SYSTEM IN SLOVAKIA

Investments in human capital, including education, skills upgrading, the development of education and science, are nowadays a significant prerequisite for the further development of society and its economic growth. The required features of employees in the current labor market are: flexibility, adaptability and initiative with accountability. The Tertiary Education System should reflect these requirements so that graduates with acquired knowledge, skills and attitudes have been beneficial to employers. In the Slovakia the university education in the first and second grade are provided by: public university, state universities, private colleges and foreign universities. In this context, the main objective of this contribution is the analysis of known indicators of tertiary education in Slovakiain the period 2013-2016. The data sources for the individual indicators were obtained from the database “DATAcube”. In particular, these are the following indicators for universities: number of faculties, number of teachers, number of full-time students, number of graduates of the daily study, the number of students studying beside employment. The obtained observations were evaluated by adequate mathematical and statistical methods; respectively by econometric analyzes to obtain information for possible further forecasting of analyzed relationships. Analyzes of indicators of tertiary education in the monitored https://doi.org/10.15414/isd2018.s9. 11 INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC DAYS 2018 1996 period pointed to the existing specificities, homogeneity; respectively heterogeneity of evaluated educational institutions. The obtained results explain more deeply not only the current situation, but they are suitable inputs for adequate proposals for optimization of the tertiary education system in the Slovak Republic.
BEM Prediction of Wind Turbine Operation and Performance

For continuous operation and production of energy from wind plants, blades, gearbox, shaft components undergo millions of revolution during the lift time and experience wear and tear due to unsteady aerodynamic forces. During this process the blades need to withstand forces which vary with prevailing wind speed and turbulence at site. In this work boundary element momentum method based numerical computations were performed for horizontal axis 2.1MW pitch controlled, upwind turbine of blade radius 37m. Reduction in blade relative velocity up to 3% is possible at 1800 azimuth position due to the tower effect was observed. A change of less than 1% in blade angle of attack was found for yaw and wind shear effects. The blade angle of attack has been validated using experiment and theoretical results from Gallant, Morote, and Elgammi study. Results showed better agreement near outboard section of blade than inboard region for above rated wind speeds. Data analysis was also conducted for variable speed active pitch regulated 2.1MW wind turbine of rotor diameter 95m and hub height of 80m at a site located in India. The results showed that maximum thrust and power coefficient was found to be 0.951 and 0.447 at wind speeds ~6 m/s and 9 m/s which agreed well with manufacturer’s data and computations.
Computing the strong alliance polynomial of a graph

We introduce the strong alliance polynomial of a graph. The strong alliance polynomial of a graph $G$ with order n and strong defensive alliance number $a(G)$ is the polynomial $a(G;x):=\sum_{i=a(G)}^{n}\, a_i(G)\ x^i$, where $a_{k}(G)$ is the number of strong defensive alliances with cardinality $k$ in $G$. We obtain some properties of $a(G; x)$ and its coefficients. In particular, we compute strong alliance polynomial for path, cycle, complete, start, complete bipartite and double star graphs; some of them verify unimodality.
SHORT REPORT: DESCRIPTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF WAGTAILS "FAMILY MOTACILLIDAE" WITH REFERENCE TO PAKISTAN

In the current study, Wagtails of the Family Motacillidae were studied in Pakistan. Thirteen species and sub-species were found in different regions. Their characteristics were observed, photographs were taken, previous distributions of these species were analyzed, and a new distribution of each species was reported in this study. During study, the scavenging role of these birds was identified, and it was hoped that wagtails may play an important role in the absence of the vultures after recent downfalls in major scavengers. However, these important effects were not observed in the wagtails, and probably will not occur until their populations increase considerably.
1 Preventive Maintenance Topic Models for LNG 2 Containment Systems of LNG Marine Carriers Using 3 Dock Specifications 4

The high demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) requires more LNG carriers (LNGCs) to 16 be in operation. During transportation, there is a high risk due to the required extremely low 17 temperatures and the explosive nature of LNG cargo. Moreover, when there is a lack of experience 18 in operating old LNGCs, there is a serious concern regarding operational accidents. A systematic 19 maintenance strategy, especially for LNG cargo containment systems, is crucial for maintaining 20 safe LNG transportation at sea. The purpose of this study is to develop preventive LNG cargo 21 containment system maintenance models by using LNGC dock specifications from LNGCs of 22 various ages. The dock specifications from a conventional LNGC repairing dock were analyzed 23 using natural language processing techniques in order to develop preventive maintenance models 24 of the LNG cargo containment system. From these results, and by considering the ship’s age, it was 25 found that for young LNGCs the priority for repair should focus on checking routine consumable 26 spare parts by tank inspections, whereas for older LNGCs the focus should be on tank condition 27 maintenance rather than on other facilities. These results are expected to be useful in the 28 development of a maintenance strategy of preventive LNG cargo containment systems in maritime 29 LNG transportation. 30
Recurrent State Representation Learning with Robotic Priors

In robotics, the sensory inputs are high dimensional, however, only a small subspace is important to guide the actions of a robot. Previous work by Jonschkowski and Brock in 2015 presented an unsupervised learning method extracting a low dimensional representation using robotic priors. These robotic priors encode knowledge about the physical world in a loss function. However, their and that of other methods to learn such a representation rely on an Markovian observation space. We extend the idea of robotic priors to work on non Markovian observation spaces. For this, we train a recurrent neural network on trajectories, such that the network learns to encode past information in its hidden state. With this we are able to learn a Markovian state space. To train this network, we combine and modify existing robotic priors to work in non Markovian environments. We test our method in a 3D maze environment. To evaluate the quality of the learned state representation, we introduce a validation network that maps from the learned states to the ground truth. Using the new validation network, we show that the learned state space contains both positional and structural information of the environment. Furthermore, we use reinforcement learning and show that the learned state space is sufficient to solve a maze navigation task.
NOISY OR VALUABLE ? THE EFFECT OF EXAMINER-ADDED CITATIONS ON FIRM KNOWLEDGE FLOWS

Examiner-added citations are often viewed as ? noise? in patent data, as they obscure the measurement of knowledge flows. In this paper, we propose a more constructive view of the role of examiner-added citations, by arguing that they may actually provide access to new sources of knowledge for applicants. Using a sample of patents in three different high-tech industries, we find that under specific conditions patents that were introduced by patent examiners are likely to be reused by the applicant subsequent to the initial introduction of the citation, primarily when the added citations refer to patents that are more impactful and more related to the applicant’s knowledge base. Moreover, we do not find evidence that applicants tend to ignore the citations added by the examiners in new patent applications. Overall, our analysis suggests that examiner-added citations appear not to be a noisy signal nor subject of strategic withholding.
Repository Candidate set strategies for ant colony optimisation

Ant Colony Optimisation is a maturing class of meta-heuristic search algorithms for discrete optimisation problems that are being increasingly applied to real world problems in areas such as communications and transportation. As these techniques systematically scan the set of possible solution elements before choosing a particular one, the computational time required for each step of the algorithm can be large. One way to overcome this is to limit the number of element choices to a sensible subset, or candidate set. This paper describes some novel generic candidate set strategies and tests these on the travelling salesman and car sequencing problems. The results show that the use of candidate sets helps to find competitive solutions to the test problems in a relatively short amount of time.
Resonant frequencies of the hydrodynamic vortex

We study the sound perturbation of the hydrodynamic vortex geometry and present an exact expression for the resonant frequencies (quasispectrum) of this geometry. Exact solution for the radial part of the covariant Klein-Gordon equation in this spacetime is obtained, and is given in terms of the double confluent Heun functions. We found that the resonant frequencies are complex number.
An exploratory study in Flemish secondary education

Research suggests that defining and communicating performance expectations for teachers can have important benefits for schools. However, teacher performance is a complex construct, and schools in Flanders have substantial autonomy in defining performance expectations, but research on performance expectations held by principals and teachers is scarce. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore what principals and teachers expect of teachers, and whether principals’ expectations are clear to teachers. The findings of our interviews with principals and teachers in four secondary schools in Flanders indicate that expectations are context-dependent and subjective. In general, expectations regarding teaching are similar for all teachers, while expectations of school team performance are more teacher-dependent, debatable and diverse. Moreover, certain expectations of principals remain unclear to teachers, especially to more experienced teachers. Finally, teachers themselves also influence expectations in their schools. We discuss important aspects of managing performance expectations, as well as implications for educational policy, research and practice.
Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems

Employing cloud computing to acquire the beneﬁt of cloud by optimizing various parameters that meet changing demands is a challenging task. The optimal mapping of tasks to virtual machines (VMs) and VMs to physical machines (PMs) (known as VM placement) problem are necessary for advancing energy consumption and resource utilization. High heterogeneity of tasks as well as resources, great dynamism and virtualization make the consolidation issue more complicated in the cloud computing system. In this paper, a complete mapping (i.e., task VM and VM to PM) algorithm is proposed. The tasks are classiﬁed according to their resource requirement and then searching for the appropriate VM and again searching for the appropriate PM where the selected VM can be deployed. The proposed algorithm reduces the energy consumption by depreciating the number of active PMs, while also minimizes the makespan and task rejection rate. We have evaluated our proposed approach in CloudSim simulator, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm over some existing standard algorithms. © 2018 Published by Elsevier Inc.
Root-zone temperature effects on photosynthesis , 14 C-photoassimilate partitioning and growth of temperate lettuce ( Lactuca sativa cv . ‘ Panama ’ ) in the tropics

The effect of root growth temperature on maximal photosynthetic CO2 assimilation (Pmax), carbohydrate content, C-photoassimilate partitioning, growth, and root morphology of lettuce was studied after transfer of the root system from cool root-zone temperature (C-RZT) of 20 C to hot ambient-RZT (A-RZT) and vice versa. Four days after RZT transfer, Pmax and leaf total soluble sugar content were highest and lowest, respectively, in C-RZT and A-RZT plants. Pmax and total leaf soluble sugar content were much lower in plants transferred from Cto A-RZT (C→A-RZT) than in C-RZT plants. However, these two parameters were much higher in plants transferred from Ato C-RZT (A→C-RZT) than in A-RZT plants. A-RZT and C→A-RZT plants had higher root total soluble sugar content than A→C-RZT and C-RZT plants. Leaf total insoluble sugar content was similar in leaves of all plants while it was the highest in the roots of C-RZT plants. Developing leaves of C-RZT plants had higher C-photoassimilate content than A-RZT plants. The A→C-RZT plants also had higher C-photoassimilate content in their developing leaves than A-RZT plants. However, more C-photoassimilates were translocated to the roots of A-RZT and C→A-RZT plants, but they were mainly used for root thickening than for its elongation. Increases in leaf area, shoot and root fresh mass were slower in C→A-RZT than in C-RZT plants. Conversely, A→C-RZT plants had higher increases in these parameters than A-RZT plants. Lower root/shoot ratio (R/S) in C-RZT than in A-RZT plants confirmed that more photoassimilates were channelled to the shoots than to the roots of C-RZT plants. Roots of C-RZT plants had greater total length with a greater number of tips and surface area, and smaller average diameter as compared to A-RZT plants. In C→A-RZT plants, there was root thickening but the increases in its length, tip number and surface area decreased. The reverse was observed for A→ C-RZT plants. These results further supported the idea that newly fixed photoassimilates contributed more to root thickening than to root elongation in A-RZT and C→A-RZT plants. Additional key words: C-photoassimilate, carbohydrate, lettuce, photosynthetic CO2 assimilation, root morphology, root-zone temperature
Association between rs 10757274 and rs 2383206 SNPs as Genetic Risk Factors in Iranian Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

Background: There are only a few reports concerning the genetic risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD). However, 2 polymorphisms of rs10757274 and rs2383206 on chromosome 9p21.3 have been shown recently to be associated with CAD in certain populations. This is the 1st study to investigate their validity and association with CAD in a sample of the Iranian population. Methods: Genomic DNA was extracted from the peripheral blood of all participants, consisting of 111 cases with CAD and 100 normal controls with normal coronary angiographies. Genotyping of rs10757274 and rs2383206 was performed in the cases and controls using designed mismatch primers via the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) method. Results: Statistical analysis presented a significant association between the rs10757274 GG (p value = 0.029, χ2 = 7.078) and rs2383206 GG (p value = 0.036, χ2 =6.658) genotypes and CAD among the cases as compared with the normal controls. Haplotype analysis of rs10757274 and rs2383206 polymorphisms showed 43% GG/GG haplotype with a significant association with CAD (p value = 0.014, χ2 = 6.058). Conclusion: The results of this study provide an insight into the underlying molecular mechanism of CAD pathogenesis and pave the way for future functional studies on these variants.
THz generation in multiple air plasmas

Because the efficiency of THz generation in air plasma is quite low, the residual power of input beam after THz radiation is generated in air plasma remains almost the same. A new method, multiple air plasmas, is proposed. The residual power can be used to induce other air plasmas and generate THz radiation again. The multiple air plasmas method provides a potential way for the development of the intense THz source. The preliminary experimental results confirm the theoretical prediction. The multiple air plasmas generated THz can be very useful for remote THz generation and standoff detection.
Open Question Answering

Open Question Answering Anthony Fader Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Oren Etzioni Computer Science and Engineering For the past fifteen years, search engines like Google have been the dominant way of finding information online. However, search engines break down when presented with complex information needs expressed as natural language questions. Further, as more people access the web from mobile devices with limited input/output capabilities, the need for software that can interpret and answer questions becomes more pressing. This dissertation studies the design of Open Question Answering (Open QA) systems that answer questions by reasoning over large, open-domain knowledge bases. Open QA systems are faced with two challenges. The first challenge is knowledge acquisition: How does the system acquire and represent the knowledge needed to answer questions? I describe a simple and scalable information extraction technique that automatically constructs an open-domain knowledge base from web text. The second challenge that Open QA systems face is question interpretation: How does the system robustly map questions to queries over its knowledge? I describe algorithms that learn to interpret questions by leveraging massive amounts of data from community QA sites like WikiAnswers. This dissertation shows that combining information extraction with community-QA data can enable Open QA at a much larger scale than what was previously possible.