Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Equivalent T Cell Epitope Promiscuity in Ecologically Diverse Human Pathogens

Background The HLA (human leukocyte antigen) molecules that present pathogen-derived epitopes to T cells are highly diverse. Correspondingly, many pathogens such as HIV evolve epitope variants in order to evade immune recognition. In contrast, another persistent human pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has highly conserved epitope sequences. This raises the question whether there is also a difference in the ability of these pathogens’ epitopes to bind diverse HLA alleles, referred to as an epitope’s binding promiscuity. To address this question, we compared the in silico HLA binding promiscuity of T cell epitopes from pathogens with distinct infection strategies and outcomes of human exposure. Methods We used computer algorithms to predict the binding affinity of experimentally-verified microbial epitope peptides to diverse HLA-DR, HLA-A and HLA-B alleles. We then analyzed binding promiscuity of epitopes derived from HIV and M. tuberculosis. We also analyzed promiscuity of epitopes from Streptococcus pyogenes, which is known to exhibit epitope diversity, and epitopes of Bacillus anthracis and Clostridium tetani toxins, as these bacteria do not depend on human hosts for their survival or replication, and their toxin antigens are highly immunogenic human vaccines. Results We found that B. anthracis and C. tetani epitopes were the most promiscuous of the group that we analyzed. However, there was no consistent difference or trend in promiscuity in epitopes contained in HIV, M. tuberculosis, and S. pyogenes. Conclusions Our results show that human pathogens with distinct immune evasion strategies and epitope diversities exhibit equivalent levels of T cell epitope promiscuity. These results indicate that differences in epitope promiscuity do not account for the observed differences in epitope variation and conservation.
Improving the Mathematical Comprehension and Learning Independency through Discovery Learning Model on Trigonometry for High School Students

The background study of this research was based on the lack of mathematical understanding and students’ learning independency of Class X at one of the senior high schools in Aceh Besar. The test results on the trigonometry subject showed that only 3 out of 10 students (30%) passed the minimum score. This condition was also found during the observation of student activities in their learning process. Students tended to rely on teachers and friends to cope with the problems, such as lack of initiative, have poor learning management and easy to feel discouraged. The main objectives of this research were (1) to improve students’ mathematical comprehension, and (2) to improve students’ learning independency through discovery learning model on the trigonometry subject. This is a classroom action research. The subjects of this study were ten students at Class X of science class. The research instruments consisted of a set of mathematical comprehension test and students independent learning questionnaire. The technique of data collection used was a qualitative approach, and the collected data was described in descriptive form. The results show that there was an improvement of the learning process through the discovery of learning model, based on the mathematical comprehension test results (from 68.3% in cycle I to 71.7% in cycle II), and the improvement of student’s independent learning (from 42.2% in cycle I to 47.1% in cycle II). Therefore, Discovery learning model effectively improves students' understanding ability, encourage student-learning independency and enlarge students’ mathematical comprehension. Keywords: mathematical comprehension, learning independence, discovery learning.
Personal information retrieval

A personal information retrieval tool, offering a unified search interface to all data sources available to a user and operating with some degree of knowledge of the user’s preferences and context, seems desirable in light of the vast amount of information available in electronic form. Such a tool however raises challenging research questions in areas include source discovery and selection, result merging and presentation, making use of context, and evaluating the tool’s success or failure. New algorithms for server selection, which need little knowledge of server holdings, have proved useful in a “natural” testbed based on web tasks and data. A new technique has also been developed and tested for evaluating IR systems, or components, in a context-laden, dynamic environment with private information sources and queries. Future plans include using these new techniques to compare methods for result merging and presentation, and for exploiting context.
Assessing and developing community participation in primary health care in Aotearoa New Zealand: a national study.

AIMS This study aimed to develop and test a framework and tool for assessing and developing community participation in Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) in New Zealand. METHODS A qualitative study completed in three phases: semi-structured interviews with 42 key stakeholders in the primary care sector; development of and consultation on a draft toolkit, which included a PHO review process; and piloting the toolkit in four different types of PHOs. RESULTS A toolkit entitled Community Participation: A Resource Kit and Self-Assessment Tool for PHOs (CP Toolkit for PHOs) was developed, which contains a set of resources for organisational self-review and a framework for community participation under the six headings: Organisational Structure, Maori Responsiveness, Governance and Management Processes, Use of Resources, Links to the Wider Community, and Consultation and Decision-Making. The pilot PHO sites found the CP Toolkit, and the review process contained within it, to be very relevant to the implementation of the Primary Health Care Strategy at a PHO level. CONCLUSIONS The Community Participation Toolkit for PHOs complements existing quality tools available for clinical general practice and nursing, and supports the further development of primary health care in New Zealand.
Wavelet transform based power quality events classification using artificial neural network and SVM

This paper demonstrates classification of PQ events utilizing wavelet transform (WT) energy features by artificial neural network (ANN) and SVM classifiers. The proposed scheme utilizes wavelet based feature extraction to be used for the artificial neural networks in the classification. Six different PQ events are considered in this study. Three types of neural network classifiers such as feed forward multilayer back propagation (FFML), learning vector quantization (LVQ), probabilistic neural network (PNN) are analyzed for effective classification of PQ events. The results show the superiority of PNN over FFML and LVQ. The test simulations show that SVM has higher performance than ANN with feed forward multilayer back propagation (FFML), learning vector quantization (LVQ), probabilistic neural network (PNN).
Lipopolysaccharide from Rhodobacter sphaeroides Attenuates Microglia-Mediated Inflammation and Phagocytosis and Directs Regulatory T Cell Response

Microglia activation and neuroinflammation are key events during the progression of neurodegenerative disorders. Microglia exhibits toll-like receptors (TLRs), with predominant expression of TLR4, inducing aberrant neuroinflammation and exacerbated neurotoxicity. Studies suggest that microglia initiate infiltration of T cells into the brain that critically influence disease conditions. We report that LPS-Rs, through TLR4 antagonism, significantly inhibit TLR4 mediated inflammatory molecules like IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, COX-2, iNOS, and NO. LPS-Rs regulates JNK/p38 MAPKs and p65-NF-κB signaling pathways, which we report as indispensible for LPS induced neuroinflammation. LPS-Rs mitigates microglial phagocytic activity and we are first to report regulatory role of LPS-Rs which blocked microglia mediated inflammation and apoptotic cell death. LPS-Rs significantly inhibits expression of costimulatory molecules CD80, CD86, and CD40. Chemokine receptor, CCR5, and T cell recruitment chemokines, MIP-1α and CCL5, were negatively regulated by LPS-Rs. Furthermore, LPS-Rs significantly inhibited lymphocyte proliferation with skewed regulatory T (Treg) cell response as evidenced by increased FOXP3, IL-10, and TGF-β. Additionally, LPS-Rs serves to induce coordinated immunosuppressive response and confer tolerogenic potential to activated microglia extending neurosupportive microenvironment. TLR4 antagonism can be a strategy providing neuroprotection through regulation of microglia as well as the T cells.
Separated by a Common Currency? Evidence from the Euro Changeover

We study the price convergence of goods and services in the euro area in 2001-2002. To measure the degree of convergence, we compare the prices of around 220 items in 32 European cities. The width of the border is the price di¤erence attributed to the fact that the two cities are in different countries. We find that the 2001 European borders are negative, which suggests that the markets were very integrated before the euro changeover. Moreover, we do not identify an integration effect attributable to the introduction of the euro. We then explore the determinants of the European borders. We find that different languages, wealth and population differences tend to split the markets. Historical inflation, though, tends to lead to price convergence.
Linguistics as Data Mining: Dutch Diminutives

There are several diierent ways data mining (the automatic induction of knowledge from data) can be applied to the problem of natural language processing. In the past, data mining techniques have mainly been used in linguistic engineering applications to solve knowledge acquisition bottlenecks. In this paper, we show that they can also assist in linguistic theory formation by providing a new tool for the evaluation of linguistic hypotheses, for the extraction of rules from corpora, and for the discovery of useful linguistic categories. Applying Quinlan's C4.5 inductive machine learning method to a particular linguistic task (diminutive formation in Dutch) we show that data mining techniques can be used (i) to test linguistic hypotheses about this process, and (ii) to discover interesting linguistic rules and categories.
Inclusion and School Reform: Transforming America's Classrooms

From the distinguished authors of Beyond Separate Education comes this panoramic view of inclusive education -- past, present, and future. Grounded in historical perspective and fueled by contemporary accomplishments, the insightful discussions in this volume cover a wide range of issues, from program implementation to court decisions. Emphasizing the need for the concurrent development of inclusion and school restructuring, the authors share with policy makers, administrators, school board members, teachers, and parents their solid understanding of school reform, as well as a vision for the 21st century.
Serving Our Youth: Findings from a National Survey of Services Providers Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth Who Are Homeless or At Risk of Becoming Homeless

Author(s): Durso, Laura E. ; Gates, Gary J. | Abstract: Over the past ten years, the percentage of homeless youth providers serving LGBT clients has increased from 82% to 94%. A majority of LGBT youth are receiving services that are available to all young people, with 24% of agency youth-oriented programs specifically being designed for LGBT youth. Nearly seven in ten (68%) respondents indicated that family rejection was a major factor contributing to LGBT youth homelessness, making it the most cited factor. More than half (54%) of respondents indicated that abuse in their family was another important factor contributing to LGBT homelessness. Additionally, more than 75% of responding agencies worked with transgender youth in the past year.Data are based on the LGBT Homeless Youth Provider Survey, a web-based survey conducted from October 2011 through March 2012. Based on data from 381 respondents, representing 354 agencies providing youth with homeless-related services, the report outlines key statistics on what LGBT youth populations are served by these agencies, who is most at risk, and why these populations are most at risk.
Thalasseleotrididae, new family of marine gobioid fishes from New Zealand and temperate Australia, with a revised definition of its sister taxon, the Gobiidae (Teleostei: Acanthomorpha)

Thalasseleotrididae n. fam. is erected to include two marine genera, Thalasseleotris Hoese & Larson from temperate Aus-tralia and New Zealand, and Grahamichthys Whitley from New Zealand. Both had been previously classified in the familyEleotrididae. The Thalasseleotrididae is demonstrably monophyletic on the basis of a single synapomorphy: membraneconnecting the hyoid arch to ceratobranchial 1 broad, extending most of the length of ceratobranchial 1 (= first gill slitrestricted or closed). The family represents the sister group of a newly diagnosed Gobiidae on the basis of five synapo-morphies: interhyal with cup-shaped lateral structure for articulation with preopercle; laterally directed posterior processon the posterior ceratohyal supporting the interhyal; pharyngobranchial 4 absent; dorsal postcleithrum absent; urohyalwithout ventral shelf. The Gobiidae is defined by three synapomorphies: five branchiostegal rays; expanded and medially-placed ventral process on ceratobranchial 5; dorsal hemitrich of pelvic-fin rays with complex proximal head. This studyrepresents a contribution to our ongoing clarification of the family Eleotrididae, which has served historically as a repository for genera not classified among the more derived gobioids (= Gobiidae as defined here).
Land reform in India

Land reform usually refers to redistribution of land from the rich to the poor. More broadly, it includes regulation of ownership, operation, leasing, sales, and inheritance of land (indeed, the redistribution of land itself requires legal changes). In an agrarian economy like India with great scarcity, and an unequal distribution, of land, coupled with a large mass of the rural population below the poverty line, there are compelling economic and political arguments for land reform. Not surprisingly, it received top priority on the policy agenda at the time of Independence. In the decades following independence India passed a significant body of land reform legislation. The 1949 Constitution left the adoption and implementation of land and tenancy reforms to state governments. This led to a lot of variation in the implementation of these reforms across states and over time, a fact that has been utilized in empirical studies trying to understand the causes and effects of land reform.
Signal and image segmentation using pairwise Markov chains

The aim of this paper is to apply the recent pairwise Markov chain model, which generalizes the hidden Markov chain one, to the unsupervised restoration of hidden data. The main novelty is an original parameter estimation method that is valid in a general setting, where the form of the possibly correlated noise is not known. Several experimental results are presented in both Gaussian and generalized mixture contexts. They show the advantages of the pairwise Markov chain model with respect to the classical hidden Markov chain one for supervised and unsupervised restorations.
Polyhedral Risk Measures in Stochastic Programming

We consider stochastic programs with risk measures in the objective and study stability properties as well as decomposition structures. Thereby we place emphasis on dynamic models, i.e., multistage stochastic programs with multiperiod risk measures. In this context, we define the class of polyhedral risk measures such that stochastic programs with risk measures taken from this class have favorable properties. Polyhedral risk measures are defined as optimal values of certain linear stochastic programs where the arguments of the risk measure appear on the right-hand side of the dynamic constraints. Dual representations for polyhedral risk measures are derived and used to deduce criteria for convexity and coherence. As examples of polyhedral risk measures we propose multiperiod extensions of the Conditional-Value-at-Risk.
Distributed event-based control of physically interconnected systems

This paper investigates event-based control of systems that are composed of physically interconnected subsystems. The event-based controller consists of a control input generator and an event generator. The main aim for the design of these components is (i) to approximate the behavior of a continuous state-feedback control by the event-based control with adjustable accuracy and (ii) to reduce the feedback communication compared to a decentralized event-based control approach proposed in literature. In the event-based control loop i, the triggering of events is caused by the coupling input to subsystem i. The proposed event-based control approach diminishes the influence of these interconnections by using an approximate model, which estimates the behavior of the neighbors of subsystem i, for the control input generation. Events are triggered based on two different conditions: The first one causes a transmission of the current subsystem state locally from event generator i to control input generator i. The second type of event is triggered whenever the state of the approximate model needs to be reset. This brings up a new kind of event-based control where the event generator i requests current state information from the neighbors of subsystem i. The event-based controller works in a distributed manner, because it uses both local state information as well as information from neighbor systems. It is shown that the deviation between the behavior of the continuous and the event-based control system depends upon the parameter of the first triggering condition only, whereas the minimum inter-event times can be adjusted by means of the parameter of the second triggering condition.
A combined CAPEX and OPEX cost model for LTE networks

The paper presents a detailed techno-economic model for LTE networks with inherent coupling of CAPEX and OPEX cost elements. Every resource of the developed cost model defines its contribution to the investment and operation costs, which allows for a detailed tracking and reporting of capital and operation expenditures from single elements to complete network abstraction. The internal structure of the model makes use of template replication that allows for the modelling of a generalized modular structure of a network location in great detail, which is in turn instantiated and parameterized to as many instances as required to match the respective operator network. Several techniques are described to demonstrate simple modelling solutions for complex network structures. This combined CAPEX and OPEX model is run for several scenarios to exemplarily demonstrate its usage for strategic modelling of architectural design decisions. The software “Strategic Telecoms Evaluation Model (STEM)” was used for the model development and result analysis.
Public Alternative Schools and Programs for Students at Risk of Education Failure: 2000-01. Statistical Analysis Report.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations. It fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish reports and specialized analyses of the meaning and significance of such statistics; assist state and local education agencies in improving their statistical systems; and review and report on education activities in foreign countries. We strive to make our products available in a variety of formats and in language that is appropriate to a variety of audiences. You, as our customer, are the best judge of our success in communicating information effectively. If you have any comments or suggestions about this or any other NCES product or report, we would like to hear from you. Please direct your comments to: Background Concern among the public, educators, and policymakers about violence, weapons, and drugs on elementary and secondary school campuses, balanced with concern about sending disruptive and potentially dangerous students " out on the streets, " has spawned an increased interest in alternative schools and programs (U.S. Department of Education 1996). Many students who, for one reason or another, are not succeeding in regular public schools are being sent to alternative placements. In general, students are referred to alternative schools and programs if they are at risk of education failure, as indicated by poor grades, truancy, disruptive behavior, suspension, pregnancy, or similar factors associated with early withdrawal from school (Paglin and Fager 1997). The 2001 " District Survey of Alternative Schools and Programs, " conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) through its Fast Response Survey System (FRSS), is the first national study of public alternative schools and programs for students at risk of education failure to provide data on topics related to the availability of public alternative schools and programs, enrollment, staffing, and services for these students. The results presented in this report are based on questionnaire data from a nationally representative sample of 1,534 public school districts. Although there is no single commonly accepted definition of what constitutes alternative schools and programs (Lange and Sletten 2002), this survey included only public alternative schools and programs that were geared towards students at risk of education failure, that were administered by regular districts 1 , …
Impact of ATM ABR control on the performance of TCP-Tahoe and TCP-Reno

We study the effect of ATM ABR control on the throughput and fairness of running large unidirectional file transfer applications on TCP-Tahoe and TCP-Reno with a single bottleneck ATM link. The various ATM ABR control are characterized by different switch queue threshold (Qth) values which define when the bottleneck link declares congestion and starts marking RM cells and, the reduction factor (RDF) values which define how quickly the source reduces its cell transmission rate. The key results of this study are the following. First, our results show that TCP-Reno is slightly better than TCP-Tahoe in terms of the throughput when the round-trip delay is short, specially with a large packet size. Second, with a medium round-trip delay (1 ms), TCP-Reno gives a better throughput with long packets, while TCP-Tahoe performs better with short packets. Third, when the round-trip delay is long (30 ms), TCP-Tahoe clearly offers higher throughput than TCP-Reno. TCP-Tahoe consistently outperforms TCP-Reno in terms of fairness. Fourth, for a short or medium round-trip delay, tight ABR control (specially with lower RDF) results in higher throughput than loose control; while the opposite is true for a long round-trip delay. Finally, a strong positive correlation between poor throughput and poor fairness is only valid for short and medium round-trip delays for TCP-Tahoe.