Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two Spx Regulators Modulate Stress Tolerance and Virulence in Streptococcus suis Serotype 2

Streptococcus suis serotype 2 is an important zoonotic pathogen causing severe infections in pigs and humans. The pathogenesis of S. suis 2 infections, however, is still poorly understood. Spx proteins are a group of global regulators involved in stress tolerance and virulence. In this study, we characterized two orthologs of the Spx regulator, SpxA1 and SpxA2 in S. suis 2. Two mutant strains (ΔspxA1 and ΔspxA2) lacking the spx genes were constructed. The ΔspxA1 and ΔspxA2 mutants displayed different phenotypes. ΔspxA1 exhibited impaired growth in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, while ΔspxA2 exhibited impaired growth in the presence of SDS and NaCl. Both mutants were defective in medium lacking newborn bovine serum. Using a murine infection model, we demonstrated that the abilities of the mutant strains to colonize the tissues were significantly reduced compared to that of the wild-type strain. The mutant strains also showed a decreased level of survival in pig blood. Microarray analysis revealed a global regulatory role for SpxA1 and SpxA2. Furthermore, we demonstrated for the first time that Spx is involved in triggering the host inflammatory response. Collectively, our data suggest that SpxA1 and SpxA2 are global regulators that are implicated in stress tolerance and virulence in S. suis 2.
Individual Q-Learning in Normal Form Games

The single-agent multi-armed bandit problem can be solved by an agent that learns the values of each action using reinforcement learning. However, the multi-agent version of the problem, the iterated normal form game, presents a more complex challenge, since the rewards available to each agent depend on the strategies of the others. We consider the behavior of value-based learning agents in this situation, and show that such agents cannot generally play at a Nash equilibrium, although if smooth best responses are used, a Nash distribution can be reached. We introduce a particular value-based learning algorithm, which we call individual Q-learning, and use stochastic approximation to study the asymptotic behavior, showing that strategies will converge to Nash distribution almost surely in 2-player zero-sum games and 2-player partnership games. Player-dependent learning rates are then considered, and it is shown that this extension converges in some games for which many algorithms, including the basic algorithm initially considered, fail to converge.
Anuran postnasal wall homology: An experimental extirpation study

The nasal placode was extirpated unilaterally in Gosner stage 18–20 embryos of Rana sylvatica, R. palustris and R. pipiens, in order to test alternative proposed schemes of homology for the ethmoidal attachment of the palatoquadrate in anurans and urodeles. Absence of the nasal sac has no pronounced effect on the formation of larval chondrocranial structures. In contrast, in metamorphosed animals the lamina orbitonasalis and inferior prenasal process are the only nasal capsule structures present on the operated side. The medial nasal branch of the deep ophthalmic nerve passes forward over the dorsal surface of the lamina orbitonasalis, rather than through an orbitonasal foramen. Comparison with previous experimental work on urodeles supports the traditional homology of the anuran lamina orbitonasalis with the antorbital process of urodeles and other vertebrates. J. Morphol. 238:343–353, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Actinobacterial Diversity in Volcanic Caves and Associated Geomicrobiological Interactions

Volcanic caves are filled with colorful microbial mats on the walls and ceilings. These volcanic caves are found worldwide, and studies are finding vast bacteria diversity within these caves. One group of bacteria that can be abundant in volcanic caves, as well as other caves, is Actinobacteria. As Actinobacteria are valued for their ability to produce a variety of secondary metabolites, rare and novel Actinobacteria are being sought in underexplored environments. The abundance of novel Actinobacteria in volcanic caves makes this environment an excellent location to study these bacteria. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) from several volcanic caves worldwide revealed diversity in the morphologies present. Spores, coccoid, and filamentous cells, many with hair-like or knobby extensions, were some of the microbial structures observed within the microbial mat samples. In addition, the SEM study pointed out that these features figure prominently in both constructive and destructive mineral processes. To further investigate this diversity, we conducted both Sanger sequencing and 454 pyrosequencing of the Actinobacteria in volcanic caves from four locations, two islands in the Azores, Portugal, and Hawai'i and New Mexico, USA. This comparison represents one of the largest sequencing efforts of Actinobacteria in volcanic caves to date. The diversity was shown to be dominated by Actinomycetales, but also included several newly described orders, such as Euzebyales, and Gaiellales. Sixty-two percent of the clones from the four locations shared less than 97% similarity to known sequences, and nearly 71% of the clones were singletons, supporting the commonly held belief that volcanic caves are an untapped resource for novel and rare Actinobacteria. The amplicon libraries depicted a wider view of the microbial diversity in Azorean volcanic caves revealing three additional orders, Rubrobacterales, Solirubrobacterales, and Coriobacteriales. Studies of microbial ecology in volcanic caves are still very limited. To rectify this deficiency, the results from our study help fill in the gaps in our knowledge of actinobacterial diversity and their potential roles in the volcanic cave ecosystems.
A mechanism of self-destruction of the eurozone. CEPS Commentary, 9 November 2010

Drawing an analogy with the ill-fated Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the pre-eurozone era, Paul De Grauwe argues in a new CEPS Commentary that the creation of a sovereign debt default mechanism is a very bad decision that will make the eurozone more fragile by making financial crises an endemic feature.
Location Information System for Access Points in the Heterogeneous Wireless Enviornment

Users in the heterogeneous wireless environment can choose from 3GPP wireless network, WiMAX, WiFi-Hotspot, Blue tooth, etc. depending on their situation. In addition to a charging plan and information about the transmission rate, a user or a mobile terminal should have information about which kind of communication services can be used and their coverage areas. Since most carrier operators do not disclose the accurate locations of their base stations, a location information system has to estimate an unknown base station's location on the basis of information stored in the mobile terminal, or looks for them and measures their location. We propose a location information system that estimates an unknown base station's location around a mobile terminal from positional relation of base stations and distances between the mobile terminal and unknown base stations.
Dairy Foods in a Moderate Energy Restricted Diet Do Not Enhance Central Fat, Weight, and Intra-Abdominal Adipose Tissue Losses nor Reduce Adipocyte Size or Inflammatory Markers in Overweight and Obese Adults: A Controlled Feeding Study

Background. Research on dairy foods to enhance weight and fat loss when incorporated into a modest weight loss diet has had mixed results. Objective. A 15-week controlled feeding study to determine if dairy foods enhance central fat and weight loss when incorporated in a modest energy restricted diet of overweight and obese adults. Design. A 3-week run-in to establish energy needs; a 12-week 500 kcal/d energy reduction with 71 low-dairy-consuming overweight and obese adults randomly assigned to diets: ≤1 serving dairy/d (low dairy, LD) or ≤4 servings dairy/d (adequate dairy, AD). All foods were weighed and provided by the metabolic kitchen. Weight, fat, intra-abdominal adipose tissue (IAAT), subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) macrophage number, SAT inflammatory gene expression, and circulating cytokines were measured. Results. No diet differences were observed in weight, fat, or IAAT loss; nor SAT mRNA expression of inflammation, circulating cytokines, fasting lipids, glucose, or insulin. There was a significant increase (P = 0.02) in serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the AD group. Conclusion. Whether increased dairy intake during weight loss results in greater weight and fat loss for individuals with metabolic syndrome deserves investigation. Assessment of appetite, hunger, and satiety with followup on weight regain should be considered.
The co-regulator dNAB interacts with Brinker to eliminate cells with reduced Dpp signaling

The proper development of tissues requires morphogen activity that dictates the appropriate growth and differentiation of each cell according to its position within a developing field. Elimination of underperforming cells that are less efficient in receiving/transducing the morphogenetic signal is thought to provide a general fail-safe mechanism to avoid developmental misspecification. In the developing Drosophila wing, the morphogen Dpp provides cells with growth and survival cues. Much of the regulation of transcriptional output by Dpp is mediated through repression of the transcriptional repressor Brinker (Brk), and thus through the activation of target genes. Mutant cells impaired for Dpp reception or transduction are lost from the wing epithelium. At the molecular level, reduced Dpp signaling results in Brk upregulation that triggers apoptosis through activation of the JNK pathway. Here we show that the transcriptional co-regulator dNAB is a Dpp target in the developing wing that interacts with Brk to eliminate cells with reduced Dpp signaling through the JNK pathway. We further show that both dNAB and Brk are required for cell elimination induced by differential dMyc expression, a process that depends on reduced Dpp transduction in outcompeted cells. We propose a novel mechanism whereby the morphogen Dpp regulates the responsiveness to its own survival signal by inversely controlling the expression of a repressor, Brk, and its co-repressor, dNAB.
Distributed Implementation for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification is to associate people across different camera views at different locations and time. Current computer vision algorithms on person re-identification mainly focus on performance, making it unsuitable for distributed systems. For distributed system, computational complexity, network usage, energy consumption and memory requirement are as important as the performance. In this paper, we compare the merits of the current algorithms. We consider three key algorithms Keep It Simple and Straightforward MEtric (KISSME), Symmetry-Driven Accumulation of Local Features (SDALF) and Unsupervised Saliency Matching (USM). The advantage of SDALF, and USM is that they are unsupervised methods so training is not required but computationally many time expensive than KISSME. Saliency based method is superior in performance but also has the longest feature length. As the feature needs to be transmitted from one camera to other in distributed system, this mean higher energy consumption and longer time delay. Among these three, KISSME offers a balance between performance, complexity and feature lengths hence more suitable for distributed systems.
A O ] 8 O ct 2 00 2 THE FRACTAL DIMENSION OF AN OIL SPRAY

We study the fractal dimension of the contour of the liquid-gas interface in a spray. Our images include both, the linking region and the break-up region and are obtained with a high-resolution shadowgraph technique; this means that the images can then be subject to an intensity filtering, equivalent to a threshold analysis, that enables the establishment of the fractal range.
Swift X-ray Afterglows: Where are the X-ray Jet Breaks?

We examine the Swift/X-ray Telescope (XRT) light curves from the first ~150 gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows. Although we expected to find jet breaks at typical times of 1-2 days after the GRB, we find that these appear to be extremely rare. Typical light curves have a break in the slope at about 10^4s, followed by a single power-law decay whose slope is much too shallow to be consistent with expectations for jet breaks. X-ray light curves typically extend out to ~10 days without any further breaks, until they become too faint for the XRT to detect. In some extreme cases, light curves extend out to more than two months without evidence for jet breaks. This raises concerns about our understanding of afterglow and jet dynamics, and of GRB energetics.
Pricing to Acceptability : With applications to valuing one s own credit risk

The theory of pricing to acceptability developed for incomplete markets is applied to marking ones own default risk. It is observed in agreement with Heckman (2004), that assets and liabilities are not to be valued in nancial reporting at the same magnitude. Liabilities are to be marked at the ask prices of two price economies that are above the asset mark at the bid prices for such economies. Applying cones of acceptability de ned by concave distortions it is observed that counterintuitive pro tability resulting from credit deterioration is then mitigated. We argue that the di¤erence between the liability mark at two price ask and the asset mark at the two price bid be taken as an upfront expense deposited in a special account called the ODOR account for Own Default Operating Reserve. Procedures are described for pricing coupon bonds separately as assets and liabilities. These procedures employ the default time distribution embedded in the CDS market.
Virtual Lucidity: A Media Archaeology of Dream Hacking Wearables

In 2014, engineers and entrepreneurs began meeting up in San Francisco to explore how virtual reality and lucid dreaming headsets using electroencephalography and other kinds of biofeedback could stimulate altered mental states. They called these practices “consciousness hacking” and referred to research, financing, and design efforts around these wearables as a movement. Unlike Quantified Self practitioners who combine bodily self-tracking and population analytics to optimize health and productivity, these hackers prod their bodies to gain immediacy to their consciousness. By turning perception inward, they attempt to displace the mediation of technologies. They believe hacking the mind through data-driven stimulation can transform it into the ultimate medium for purposeful dreams, flow states, positive emotions, and secular revelations about the self, unconscious, and nature of experience. How do these practices reconcile New Age assumptions about the sacred essence of the self, with biopolitical assumptions about the self as a database to be rationalized according to the 24/7 demands of late capitalism? This essay uses media archeology to examine how discursive and material practices around consciousness hacking proffer a vision about the mind as medium that is futuristic yet ancient. By using the Consciousness Hacking movement as a starting point to investigate historical neuro-stimulative apparatuses for lucid dreaming, media archaeology can trace convergent trajectories of self-knowledge and self-making. This analysis traces connections from Bert Kaplan’s 1950s database of dreams, to crowdfunded EEG headsets that promise to unlock the secrets of the collective unconscious using big data analytics. By probing historical antecedents of datalogical fantasies, this project demonstrates the value of critical inquiry into the techno-spiritual undercurrent of contemporary technoculture, its models and mechanisms for the human sensorium, and its metaphors that we live by.
The Optimum Design Methodology of Low-Phase-Noise LC-VCO Using Multiple-Divide Technique

SUMMARY The multiple-divide technique, using the multi-ratio frequency divider, has a possibility to improve FoM of VCO. This paper proposes a design optimization of LC-VCO using the multiple-divide technique. In the simulated results using 90-nm CMOS model parameters, the optimum frequency range, achieving better than −187.0 dBc/Hz of FoM, can be extended from 6.5–12.5 GHz to 1.5–12.5 GHz. The proposed multiple-divide technique can provide a lower phase-noise, lower power consumption, smaller layout area of LC-VCO.
Sparse matrix transform for fast projection to reduced dimension

We investigate three algorithms that use the sparse matrix transform (SMT) to produce variance-maximizing linear projections to a lower-dimensional space. The SMT expresses the projection as a sequence of Givens rotations and this enables computationally efficient implementation of the projection operator. The baseline algorithm uses the SMT to directly approximate the optimal solution that is given by principal components analysis (PCA). A variant of the baseline begins with a standard SMT solution, but prunes the sequence of Givens rotations to only include those that contribute to the variance maximization. Finally, a simpler and faster third algorithm is introduced; this also estimates the projection operator with a sequence of Givens rotations, but in this case, the rotations are chosen to optimize a criterion that more directly expresses the dimension reduction criterion.
Adaptive color space switching for face tracking in multi-colored lighting environments

There are many studies that use color space models (CSM) for detection of faces in an image. Most researchers a priori select a given CSM, and proceed to use the selected model for color segmentation of the face by constructing a color distribution model (CDM). There is limited work on finding the overall best CSM. We develop a procedure to adaptively change the CSM throughout the processing of a video. We show that this works in environments where the face moves through multi-positioned light sources with varying types of illumination. A test of the procedure using the 2D color space models; RG, rg, HS, YQ and CbCr found that switching between the color spaces resulted in increased tracking performance. In addition, we have proposed a new performance measure for evaluating color-tracking algorithms, which include both accuracy and robustness of the tracking window. The methodology developed can be used to find the optimal CSM-CDM combination in adaptive color tracking systems.
Following multi-dimensional type Ia supernova explosion models to homologous expansion

The last years have witnessed a rapid development of three-dimensional models of type Ia supernova explosions. The next step is to evaluate these models varying the initial parameters and to compare them with observations. To calculate synthetic lightcurves and spectra from numerical models, it is mandatory to follow the evolution up to homologous expansion. We report on methods to achieve this in our current implementation of multi-dimensional type Ia supernova explosion models. The novel scheme is thoroughly tested in two dimensions and a simple example of a three-dimensional simulation is presented. We discuss to what degree the assumption of homologous expansion is justified in these models.
Modeling the spatial conformation and allosteric phenomenon of protein alpha helix's tertiary structure

A good mathematical model is the foundation to apply control theory into complex biological networks and proceed efficient algorithms to research on its spatial structure and function. A mathematical formulation of the protein tertiary structure is proposed in this paper. The goal is to mathematically model the three-dimensional spatial conformation of the peptide chain and its allosteric phenomenon. Matrix theory and Dynamics are employed to represent key concepts related to spatial model. It is hoped that this work could lay a mathematical foundation for introducing system and control theories into molecular biology.
The Longitudinal Association Between Social-Media Use and Depressive Symptoms Among Adolescents and Young Adults: An Empirical Reply to Twenge et al. (2018)

Research by Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, and Martin has indicated that there may be an association between social-media use and depressive symptoms among adolescents. However, because of the cross-sectional nature of this work, the relationship among these variables over time remains unclear. Thus, in this longitudinal study we examined the associations between social-media use and depressive symptoms over time using two samples: 594 adolescents (Mage = 12.21) who were surveyed annually for 2 years, and 1,132 undergraduate students (Mage = 19.06) who were surveyed annually for 6 years. Results indicate that among both samples, social-media use did not predict depressive symptoms over time for males or females. However, greater depressive symptoms predicted more frequent social-media use only among adolescent girls. Thus, while it is often assumed that social-media use may lead to depressive symptoms, our results indicate that this assumption may be unwarranted.
Why Do Firms Hedge Selectively ? Evidence from the Gold Mining Industry ∗

We examine why firms hedge selectively even though prior research shows that the gains from such speculative activities are economically insignificant. We find that smaller firms speculate more than larger firms, and that firms with a higher probability of bankruptcy speculate more than firms with a lower probability of bankruptcy. These cross-sectional differences are the opposite of what a theory of selective hedging based on information and financial superiority would predict, and are more consistent with an agency-theoretic or financial constraints explanation. We also find that selective hedging is negatively correlated with managerial stock and stock option holdings, which is inconsistent with the notion that convexity in managerial compensation is a motive for managers to speculate.
Back-End Design of a Collision-Resistive RFID System through High-Level Modeling Approach

A highly collision-resistive RFID system multiplexes communications between thousands of transponders and a single reader using TH-CDMA based anti-collision scheme. This paper focuses on the back-end design consideration of such an RFID system with the deployment of high-level modeling techniques, accompanying a technical comparison of physical-level description, hardware-based emulation, and software-based simulation. A new rapid-prototyping simulation system was constructed to evaluate the robustness of a multiplexed RFID link system with more than 1,000 channels in the presence of field disturbances, and the design parameters of the back-end digital signal processing that dominated anti-collision performance were explored. Finally, the derived optimum parameters were applied to the design of a back-end digital integrated circuit to be installed in collision-resistive transponder circuitry.
ROI perspective transform based road marking detection and recognition

Road marking detection and recognition play an important role in driving assistance system and intelligent transportation system. We proposed a method for road marking recognition which can be applied to highway and city road based on ROI perspective transform. If we can detect the lane lines on the road, we determine the trapezoid ROI where road marking would show up with the guide of detected lane lines. Then the ROI is transformed to square by inverse perspective transform for accurate road marking detection and recognition. If there are no legible lane lines that we can take use of, we estimate the ROI according to experience and adopt the method of connected domain analysis to extract target. Template matching is used for recognition of markings. Overall, the metrics of the method are as follows. First, the detection of lane lines is based on the ATN model which is fast and robust. Second, the detected lines are used as guide for the search of markings, and thus, there is no need to search the makings in the whole image. Third, even there is no lane lines, for example, the lines is worn out or blocked by the vehicle ahead on the city road, the connected domain analysis makes the method suitable for these situations.