Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial Social Network Analysis of Resource Access in Rural South Africa

Communities in the rural developing world often sit at the margin of market, migration, and technology exchanges. They are arguably becoming more interconnected and networked than ever before. This article seeks to expand on an understanding of natural resource access in the rural developing world by combining social network analysis (SNA) data and geographic position data obtained via Global Positioning System (GPS) and participatory mapping in rural South Africa. This work therefore utilizes a sociospatial framework in understanding natural resource use and access in a community-level analysis. Notably, in our study we find very little association among natural resource use, access, and social position with even the most tolerant measure but enough association so as not to dismiss the relationship completely. We believe that our results can inform investigations of both resource access and social network position and conclude that a subsequent possibilist approach to human–environmental interactions would be an ideal framework for this methodology and potentially for sociospatial studies more widely.
): evidence of Validity of The Brazilian Version

This study aimed to show evidence of validity for the Brazilian short version (12 items) of the Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ-12). Three independent samples participated in the study, totaling 1771 subjects (64.3% women, 32.9% men and 2.9% undeclared), aged 18-79 years (M = 38.59, SD = 12.98). Confirmatory factor analyses showed acceptable adjustment indices for the four-factor structure (self-efficacy, hope, resilience and optimism) and for a second-order structure with a general factor of psychological capital explaining the four primary factors. Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses found configural, metric and scalar invariance of the measure for the different samples as well as for men and women. Finally, convergent validity analyses found a positive and moderate correlation of PCQ-12 with satisfaction with life and subjective happiness, as well as a negative and moderate correlation with perceived stress and depression
Meta-transcriptional Detection of Rickettsia canadensis from Ixodes persulcatus in China

Genus Rickettsia associated to blood-feeding arthropods are usually pathogenic when transmitted to vertebrates. These species include the agents of acute human disease such as typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. However, many other Rickettsia have been uncovered with uncertain pathogenic to vertebrates in recent surveys. It is therefore perhaps more appropriate to consider these Rickettsiaas endosymbionts that are transmitted vertically in invertebrates, and secondarily as pathogens of vertebrates. Rickettsia canadensis, an ancestor species in genus Rickettsia, had been well characterized for its peculiar genome size and genes’ contents bridging the pathogenic Rickettsiaand non-pathogenic ones. However, there is few research on the ancient rickettsia species in China which may seriously in�uence our pursue for the evolutionary nature of Rickettsia in China. In the present study, R. canadensis was detected from Ixodes persulcatusticks from forest areas of both Heilongjiang province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China. The molecular evidences from both 16S rRNA gene and 3 arrays of gene transcripts strongly indicated the natural infection of R. canadensis occurs in Ixodid ticks in China. The gene transcripts including rpoB-rpoC-rpoC/160KDa-leucyl aminopeptidase-hypothetical protein-leucyl aminopeptidase-aspartate tRNA ligase, RlmE-Omp 1-Peptidase M50-nusB, dnaK-dnaJ-ChaBfamily protein-BamD-RecN-Carboxypeptidase M32 revealed from I. persulcatus suggested the intensive interactions between R. canadensis and. host ticks, which would provide scienti�c clues to highlight the possible evolutionary trajectory of Rickettsia species in China.
An analysis of shifting EFL teachers' perceptions on continuing professional development through lesson observation

The current study sought to determine how EFL teachers perceived continuing professional development and to what extent peer coaching influenced such beliefs. In keeping with the goal of the study, a qualitative case study approach was used. Participants in this study were 16 instructors, 9 of whom were men and 7 of whom were women, who worked at a private university's School of Foreign Languages. The data were collected by means of an open-ended question and reflective papers and analyzed by using Creswell’s (2012) inductive content analysis. The results showed that four categories may be used to group the participants' perceptions of continued professional growth prior to the peer-coaching procedure. The categories were named (1) lifelong learning, (2) staying up to date, (3) skills development, and (4) team-building process. A new definition of self-leadership arose as a result of the peer-coaching process. Additionally, most participants admitted that the peer-coaching methodology had a positive impact on their career development procedures.
Discriminative identiﬁcation of transcriptional responses of promoters and enhancers after stimulus

Promoters and enhancers regulate the initiation of gene expression and maintenance of expression levels in spatial and temporal manner. Recent ﬁndings stemming from the Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) demonstrate that promoters and enhancers, based on their expression proﬁles after stimulus, belong to different transcription response subclasses. One of the most promising biological features that might explain the difference in transcriptional response between subclasses is the lo-cal chromatin environment. We introduce a novel computational framework, PEDAL, for distinguishing effectively transcriptional proﬁles of promoters and enhancers using solely histone modiﬁcation marks, chromatin accessibility and binding sites of transcription factors and co-activators. A case study on data from MCF-7 cell-line reveals that PEDAL can identify successfully the transcription response sub-classes of promoters and enhancers from two different stimulations. Moreover, we report subsets of input markers that discriminate with minimized clas-siﬁcation error MCF-7 promoter and enhancer transcription response subclasses. Our work provides a general computational approach for identifying effectively cell-speciﬁc and stimulation-speciﬁc promoter and enhancer transcriptional proﬁles, and thus, contributes to improve our understanding of transcriptional activation in human
Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota and Creative Works for Minnesota

The mangrove rivulus ( Kryptolebias marmoratus ) is a phenotypically plastic teleost fish that can spend considerable time on land and traverse the terrestrial realm through a ballistic behavior termed the tail-flip jump. The tail-flip jump is a transitional stage between fully aquatic and terrestrial lifestyles. Therefore, understanding this behavior can provide insight into how organisms adapt to new environments over evolutionary time. Taxa that are successful tail-flip jumpers have a deep caudal peduncle and uniform body shape. Studies of K. marmoratus show that terrestrial acclimation and exercise improves tail-flip jumping performance due to muscle remodeling, but the implications of these muscular changes on aquatic locomotion are unknown. In the present study, we hypothesized that 1) terrestrial acclimation and exercise lead to physiological and anatomical changes to optimize tail-flip jump distance and endurance while negatively impacting swimming performance in K. marmoratus , 2) terrestrial exercise causes muscle redistribution toward the posterior of K. marmoratus to better facilitate the tail-flip jump, and 3) terrestrial exercise and air exposure cause behavioral changes in K. marmoratus, made possible by the large degree of neural and behavioral plasticity displayed by this species. To test these hypotheses, we measured the critical swimming speed (U crit ), tail-flip jump distance, terrestrial endurance, mass distribution along the anterior-posterior axis, and undisturbed aquatic behavior of age-and size-matched K. marmoratus before and after a terrestrial exercise period. This period consisted of six three-minute exercise sessions spread over 12 days, during which the fish were prompted to jump continuously. To isolate the effects of air exposure, a separate group was exposed to air for an equivalent period but not allowed to jump. Air exposure improved maximum jump distance and negatively affected swimming performance (U crit ). Terrestrial endurance (number of jumps) improved in the exercised group, but U crit did not change
Structural and Temporal Variation in Genetic Diversity of European Spring Two‐Row Barley Cultivars and Association Mapping of Quantitative Traits

Two hundred sixteen barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) cultivars were selected to represent the diversity and history of European spring two‐row barley breeding and to search for alleles controlling agronomic traits by association genetics. The germplasm was genotyped with 7864 gene‐based single nucleotide polymorphism markers and corresponding field trial trait data relating to growth and straw strength were obtained at multiple European sites. Analysis of the marker data by statistical population genetics approaches revealed two important trends in the genetic diversity of European two‐row spring barley, namely, i) directional selection for approximately 14% of total genetic variation of the population in the last approximately 50 yr and ii) highly uneven genomic distribution of genetic diversity. Association analysis of the phenotypic and genotypic data identified multiple loci affecting the traits investigated, some of which co‐map with selected regions. Collectively, these data show that the genetic makeup of European two‐row spring barley is evolving under breeder selection, with signs of extinction of diversity in some genomic regions, suggesting that “breeding the best with the best” is leading towards fixation of some breeder targets. Nevertheless, modern germplasm also retains many regions of high diversity, suggesting that site‐specific genetic approaches for allele identification and crop improvement such as association genetics are likely to be successful.
Adjusting to Trade Policy: Evidence from U.S. Antidumping Duties on Vietnamese Catfish

In 2003, after claims of dumping, the U.S. imposed heavy tariffs on imports of catfish from Vietnam. As a result, Vietnamese exports of catfish to the U.S. market sharply declined. Using a panel data of Vietnamese households, we explore the responses of catfish producers in the Mekong delta between 2002 and 2004. We study adjustments not only in catfish aquaculture but also in other economic activities. We find that, over this period, the rate of income growth was significantly lower among households relatively more involved in catfish farming in 2002. The source of this slower growth is explained by a relative decline in both catfish income and revenues from other miscellaneous farms activities such as poultry and livestock farming. Households did not adjust labor supply, most likely because of off-farm employment limitations. We also document that households more exposed to the shock reduced the share of investment assigned to catfish, while substituting into agriculture.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ADJUSTING TO TRADE POLICY: EVIDENCE FROM U.S. ANTIDUMPING DUTIES ON VIETNAMESE CATFISH

In 2003, after claims of dumping, the U.S. imposed tariffs on imports of catfish from Vietnam ranging from 37 to 64 percent. As a result, Vietnamese exports of catfish to the U.S. market sharply declined. Using a panel data of Vietnamese households, we explore the responses of catfish producers in the Mekong delta between 2002 and 2004. We find that, over this period, the rate of growth of income was significantly lower among households relatively more involved in catfish farming in 2002. In addition, the antidumping shock triggered significant exit from catfish farming. Households adjusted by moving out of catfish aquaculture and into wage labor markets and agriculture but not into other aquaculture activities. Finally, we find evidence of rigidities in production and of spillovers into non-aquaculture household economic activities. Irene Brambilla Yale University Department of Economics 37 Hilllhouse P. O. Box 208264 New Haven, CT 06520-8264 and NBER irene.brambilla@yale.edu Guido Porto The World Bank Development Research Group 1818 H. Street, NW, MailStop MC3-303 Washington, DC 20433 gporto@worldbank.org Alessandro Tarozzi Duke University Department of Economics PO Box 90097 Durham, NC, 27708 taroz@econ.duke. edu
Measures of population immunity can predict the dominant clade of influenza A (H3N2) and reveal age-associated differences in susceptibility and specificity

For antigenically variable pathogens such as influenza, strain fitness is partly determined by the relative availability of hosts susceptible to infection with that strain compared to others. Antibodies to the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) confer substantial protection against influenza infection. We asked if a cross-sectional antibody-derived estimate of population susceptibility to different clades of influenza A (H3N2) could predict the success of clades in the following season. We collected sera from 483 healthy individuals aged 1 to 90 years in the summer of 2017 and analyzed neutralizing responses to the HA and NA of representative strains. The clade to which neutralizing antibody titers were lowest, indicating greater population susceptibility, dominated the next season. Titers to different HA and NA clades varied dramatically between individuals but showed significant associations with age, suggesting dependence on correlated past exposures. Despite this correlation, inter-individual variability in antibody titers to H3N2 strains increased gradually with age. This study indicates how representative measures of population immunity might improve evolutionary forecasts and inform selective pressures on influenza.
A Galaxy Morphology Classification Model Based on Momentum Contrastive Learning

The taxonomy of galaxy morphology plays an important role in astrophysics and provides great help for the study of galaxy evolution. To integrate the advantages of unsupervised learning without labels and supervised learning with high classification accuracy, this paper proposes a galaxy morphology classification model based on a momentum contrastive learning algorithm named Momentum Contrastive Learning Galaxy (MCL-Galaxy), which mainly includes two parts (i) pre-training of the model, where the ResNet_50 backbone network acts as an encoder to learn the galaxy morphology image features, which are stored in the queue and their consistency is ensured by using the momentum contrastive learning algorithm; and (ii) transfer learning, where Mahalanobis distance can assist in improving classification accuracy in downstream tasks where both encoder and queue are transferred. To evaluate the performance of MCL-Galaxy, we use the data set of the Galaxy Zoo challenge project on Kaggle for comparative testing. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy of MCL-Galaxy can reach 90.12%, which is 8.12% higher than the unsupervised state-of-the-art results. Although it is 3.1% lower than the advanced supervised method, it has the advantage of no label and can achieve a higher accuracy rate at the first epoch of classification iteration. This suggests that the gap between unsupervised and supervised representation learning in the field of Galaxy Morphologies classification tasks is well bridged.
An optimized Particle Filter Target Tracking Technology

In this paper, an optimized particle filter target tracking technology is proposed. In order to bring the estimated result of particle filter closer to the true value, a regular particle filter algorithm is chosen instead of the standard particle filter algorithm. In addition, this paper analyzes and improves the description of the target in the particle filter algorithm, and uses the covariance matrix technique to fuse the various information of the image to describe the target. Experiments show that the feature point tracking algorithm based on particle filter Target attitude change and the same color interference has good adaptability.
Recording channel design for time-based measurements in 28 nm CMOS

In this paper we present a recording stage dedicated to time-based measurements required in imaging detectors. The prototype ASIC is manufactured in the 28 nm CMOS process and consists of a 8 × 4-pixel matrix of 50 μm pitch. Each pixel includes a recording stage that processes input signals for the digital circuitry, responsible for performing time-based measurements such as Time-over-Threshold and Time-of-Arrival. The digital part of the pixel is made up of two ring-based oscillators, configuration registers, and counters. The recording channel occupies only 12 × 50 μm while consuming 4.5 μA current. The in-pixel coarse and fine correction methods implemented allowed an improvement of gain and offset uniformity 3.3 and 10 times, respectively.
Molecular Characteristics and Therapeutic Vulnerabilities of Claudin-low Breast Cancers Derived from Cell Line Models

Abstract Background/Aim: Breast cancers constitute heterogeneous tumor groups and their categorization in subtypes based on the expression of the estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR) and HER2 receptors has advanced therapeutics. Claudin-low breast cancer has been proposed as an additional subtype which is mostly ER, PR and HER2 negative, but its identification has not led to corresponding specific treatments yet. Materials and Methods: Breast cancer cell lines from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) were assessed for mRNA suppression of claudins and mRNA expression of ER and ERBB2 (the gene encoding HER2). The set of identified claudin-low cell lines were compared with representative ER−/ERBB2− cell lines for associated molecular alterations, gene dependencies through CRISPR and microRNA arrays and in vitro drug sensitivities using the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) project. Results: Claudin-low cell lines display up-regulation of mRNA expression of epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) regulators. Methylation sensitive genes are down-regulated in claudin-low lines compared with other cell lines, without associated up-regulation of DNA methyltransferases. Dependency screen microarrays reveal dependencies of claudin-low cell lines on components of the cytoskeleton but no consistent dependencies in known oncogenes or tumor suppressors. Potential drug sensitivities revealed in the drug screens included sensitivities to WNT pathway modulators, tyrosine kinase cascade inhibitors and BET inhibitors. On the other hand, claudin-low cell lines showed resistance to deacetylase inhibitors. Conclusion: Claudin-low cell line models duplicate features of claudin-low breast cancers and may serve as guides for identification of drugs worth exploring for further development.
Antimicrobial peptide LL-37 disrupts plasma membrane and calcium homeostasis in Candida albicans via the Rim101 pathway

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial peptides play an important role in human innate defense against microbial pathogens. LL-37 is the only member of the human cathelicidin family of antimicrobial peptides. We previously showed that LL-37 targets the cell wall of Candida albicans, thereby reducing cell adhesion to plastic surfaces, oral epidermoid cells, and urinary bladders of mice. Moreover, LL-37 also induces cell wall and endoplasmic reticulum stress responses. Here, we found that LL-37 alters plasma membrane properties. In addition, LL-37 affected calcium homeostasis and induced the generation of reactive oxygen species associated with mitochondria and vacuoles. Finally, the Rim101 pathway was linked to the cellular response to LL-37. Together, these findings provide new insights into anti-C. albicans actions of LL-37 and highlight the complex cellular responses induced by LL-37. IMPORTANCE Candida albicans is a major human fungal pathogen, and antimicrobial peptides are key components of innate immunity. Studying the interplay between C. albicans and human antimicrobial peptides would enhance a better understanding of pathogen-host interactions. Moreover, potential applications of antimicrobial peptides in antifungal therapy have aroused great interest. This work explores new mechanisms of LL-37 against C. albicans and reveals the complex connection among calcium homeostasis, oxidative stress, signaling, and possibly organelle interaction. Notably, these findings support the possible use of antimicrobial peptides to prevent and treat fungal infections. Candida albicans is a major human fungal pathogen, and antimicrobial peptides are key components of innate immunity. Studying the interplay between C. albicans and human antimicrobial peptides would enhance a better understanding of pathogen-host interactions. Moreover, potential applications of antimicrobial peptides in antifungal therapy have aroused great interest. This work explores new mechanisms of LL-37 against C. albicans and reveals the complex connection among calcium homeostasis, oxidative stress, signaling, and possibly organelle interaction. Notably, these findings support the possible use of antimicrobial peptides to prevent and treat fungal infections.
Recombinant outer membrane vesicles delivering eukaryotic expression plasmid of cytokines act as enhanced adjuvants against Helicobacter pylori infection in mice

ABSTRACT The widespread prevalence of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection remains a great challenge to human health. The existing vaccines are not ideal for preventing H. pylori infection; thus, exploring highly effective adjuvants may improve the immunoprotective efficacy of H. pylori vaccines. In a previous study, we found that the outer membrane vesicles (OMVs), a type of nanoscale particle spontaneously produced by Gram-negative bacteria, could act as adjuvants to boost the immune responses to vaccine antigens. In this study, we explored the potential application of OMVs as delivery vectors for adjuvant development. We constructed recombinant OMVs containing eukaryotic expression plasmid of cytokines, including interleukin 17A or interferon-γ, and evaluated their function as adjuvants in combination with inactivated whole-cell vaccine (WCV) or UreB as vaccine antigens. Our results showed that recombinant OMVs as adjuvants could induce stronger humoral and mucosal immune responses in mice than wild-type H. pylori OMVs and the cholera toxin (CT) adjuvant. Additionally, the recombinant OMVs significantly promoted Th1/Th2/Th17-type immune responses. Furthermore, the recombinant OMV adjuvant induced more potent clearance of H. pylori than CT and wild-type OMVs. Our findings suggest that the recombinant OMVs coupled with cytokines may become potent adjuvants for the development of novel and effective vaccines against H. pylori infection.