Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chapter 2 Antifungal Host Defense Peptides

Fungi infect billions of people every year, yet their contribution to the global burden of disease is largely unrecognized and the repertoire of antifungal agents is rather limited. Thus, treatment of life-threatening invasive fungal infections is still based on drugs discovered several decades ago. In addition, recent data on resistance emergence of fungi emphasize the urgent need for novel antifungal treatments. One alternative strategy is based on host defense peptides. Among the large number of antimicrobial peptides, a group of peptides show primarily antifungal activity by interfering with enzymes of cell wall biosynthesis or specific membrane lipids such as ergosterol. Both are promising targets for antifungal peptides, as they are absent in mammalian cells and hence low toxicity of peptides can be expected. However, most of the antimicrobial peptides exhibit a broad spectrum activity including antifungal activity. These peptides act on the cell membrane level and although their structures vary largely, they share a positive net charge, which facilitates electrostatic interactions with negatively charged lipids of the target cell, and an amphipathic structure, which facilitates incorporation into the cell membrane and in turn membrane disruption. Thereby, membrane lipids differing between mammals and fungi play a central role concerning specificity and efficacy of these peptides. Hence, understanding their molecular mechanism(s) of action will aid in the design of novel antifungal agents. Finally, some of these peptides were shown to act synergistically with conventional drugs, which would further widen the armory to treat especially life-threatening invasive fungal infections. K. Lohner (&) R. Leber Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Biophysics Division, University of Graz, NAWI Graz, BioTechMed Graz, Humboldtstrasse 50/III, 8010 Graz, Austria e-mail: karl.lohner@uni-graz.at R. Leber e-mail: regina.leber@uni-graz.at © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R.M. Epand (ed.), Host Defense Peptides and Their Potential as Therapeutic Agents, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32949-9_2 27
Bootstrapping Multilingual Intent Models via Machine Translation for Dialog Automation

With the resurgence of chat-based dialog systems in consumer and enterprise applications, there has been much success in developing data-driven and rule-based natural language models to understand human intent. Since these models require large amounts of data and in-domain knowledge, expanding an equivalent service into new markets is disrupted by language barriers that inhibit dialog automation. This paper presents a user study to evaluate the utility of out-of-the-box machine translation technology to (1) rapidly bootstrap multilingual spoken dialog systems and (2) enable existing human analysts to understand foreign language utterances. We additionally evaluate the utility of machine translation in human assisted environments, where a portion of the traffic is processed by analysts. In English→Spanish experiments, we observe a high potential for dialog automation, as well as the potential for human analysts to process foreign language utterances with high accuracy.
Aspirin for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in Japan.

To the Editor We read the economic evaluation article of aspirin for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in Japan by Tsutani et al with interest (1). They estimated the potential benefit and costs from a hypothetical simulation model based on published data and assumptions. They concluded that aspirin therapy should be recommended in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in all individuals who have at least a moderately increased risk of coronary heart disease and who do not have an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding events. Their conclusion was derived from an assumed 1.5% annual risk of coronary heart disease based on guidelines from other countries. We question whether such guidelines are valid in Japan. Who was at increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding? The absence of well-designed cohort studies, such as Framingham study to estimate the risk of cardiovascular disease and clinical trial of aspirin for primary prevention is an apparently critical issue in Japan (2, 3). We, however, analyzed the potential effects of aspirin as a primary prevention strategy against coronary heart disease in the same manner as the US Preventive Service Task Force (4, 5). We compiled published data on incidence of coronary heart disease, strokes, and gastrointestinal bleeding, and applied the risk ratios of aspirin from the US studies to the Japanese population. We concluded that aspirin should be considered for those with a 5-year coronary heart disease risk of 6 to 14% based on the individual risk factors. The 1.5% threshold of annual risk for coronary heart disease (5-year risk, 7.5%) indicated by Tsutani et al was consistent with our threshold for middle-aged men, but such thresholds should be carefully adjusted by other risk factors like the US guidelines and our analyses (4, 5). We do not intend to imply that the analyses of Tsutani et al (1) are incorrect, but we argue the process from which their recommendation was derived and the target population should be explicitly clarified. Because the risks of cardiovascular disease in Japan are different from those in Western countries, the risk calculation methods used in such countries should not be applied (5). Although they conducted simple one-way sensitivity analyses and commented that they used data from other countries, their results are weak and their conclusion is likely to overemphasize implications to Japanese healthcare providers and patients. These issues in particular should be carefully scrutinized by authors and reviewers when the authors have a relationship with manufacturers of products which they deal with in the manuscript.
Power quality improvement of grid using PV solar farm by voltage injection method

Power quality is concerned with the ability of the power source to generate power which has less harmonic content and the magnitude of voltage and frequency is under tolerance level, with the continuity of supply. It has a vital role in deciding the size, rating and cost of electrical equipment. The load variation in the system causes change in the system parameters as well as variation in the power factor of the system. This variation in power factor may cause the distortion of the voltage and current in the system and hence, can deteriorate the power quality of the system. In this work power factor of the system for a particular loading condition has been improved with the solar farm. In this work the voltage has been injected in quadrature with the system current and the magnitude of the injected voltage has been increased in steps so to achieve the desired value of power quality. The complete work has been carried out in three stages. In first stage of the work PV solar farm has been designed and MPPT has been done with fuzzy logic controller. In the second stage, MLI has been designed to produce sinusoidal waveform and in the last stage of the work the magnitude of the quadrature injected voltage has been varied. MATLAB / Simulink environment has been used for the solar farm design and analysis.
Region Growing for Text Detection in Natural Scenes

Text detection and recognition is a popular area of research in computer vision that aims at identifying text in natural images. While optical character recognition systems have met with considerable success in detecting and recognizing printed and typeset alphabets, systems with the ability to recognize text in natural settings have emerged only recently. In this work we examine one such system that uses a stage wise approach to text detection. We attempt to improve the character segmentation stage by suggesting a character growing approach based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs) as a possible alternative to the currently used flood filling approach. Initial qualitative results show that MSER might provide a considerable speed up and retain reasonable accuracy.
Enabling Name-based Packet Forwarding over Flat ID Network Architectures

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has the potential to improve the performance of content retrieval in terms of latency and resource efficiency. One of ICN’smain challenges is attaining routing scalabilitywhenconfrontedwithahugecontent space. This is specially true in flat ID architectures, which do not naturally support route aggregation for hierarchical names to reduce forwarding table size. Bloom Filters (BFs) have been proposed as a way of improving scalability by aggregating content descriptors in a fixed-size BF. However, the negative impact of false positive (FPs) matches on forwarding correctness andperformancehasnot been studied thoroughly. In this paper, we study the end-to-end network performance of BF-based forwarding.Wedevise an analyticalmodel that accurately models BF-based forwarding and the flow of BF-based packets over inter-domain topologies. Using this model, we show that the use of BFs for packet forwarding puts feasibility at odds with scalability. Based on our analysis, we propose and evaluate several strategies to improve the feasibility of BF-based forwarding and examine the use cases for which BF-based forwarding is suitable.
Learning Coordinated Tasks using Reinforcement Learning in Humanoids

With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, humanoid robots are made to learn a variety of skills which humans possess. One of fundamental skills which humans use in day-to-day activities is performing tasks with coordination between both the hands. In case of humanoids, learning such skills require optimal motion planning which includes avoiding collisions with the surroundings. In this paper, we propose a framework to learn coordinated tasks in cluttered environments based on DiGrad - A multi-task reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous action-spaces. Further, we propose an algorithm to smooth the joint space trajectories obtained by the proposed framework in order to reduce the noise instilled during training. The proposed framework was tested on a 27 degrees of freedom (DoF) humanoid with articulated torso for performing coordinated object-reaching task with both the hands in four different environments with varying levels of difficulty. It is observed that the humanoid is able to plan collision free trajectory in real-time. Simulation results also reveal the usefulness of the articulated torso for performing tasks which require coordination between both the arms.
GeSn/SiGeSn Multiple-Quantum-Well Electroabsorption Modulator With Taper Coupler for Mid-Infrared Ge-on-Si Platform

We propose a taper coupler electroabsorption modulator (EAM) composed of GeSn/SiGeSn multiple-quantum-well (MQW) on Ge-on-Si platform for mid-infrared (2 <italic>μ</italic>m) integrated optical active devices. The epitaxial design is performed by calculating the absorption spectra of GeSn/SiGeSn MQW using many-body theory to investigate the extinction characteristics of GeSn MQW waveguides. Two types of taper couplers are considered for connecting Ge-rib waveguide and GeSn-MQW-highmesa waveguide efficiently. One is an adiabatic taper coupler (ATC) type EAM and it is useful for thin Ge-buffer structure in terms of the extinction ratio. Another is a resonant taper coupler (RTC) type EAM and it is superior to ATC type EAM for thick Ge-buffer. It is confirmed that RTC type EAM can obtain the high extinction characteristics with low-loss and shorter device length (6.87 dB, −3.97 dB, and 215 <italic>μ</italic>m) compared with conventional ATC type EAM for thick Ge-buffer (5.67 dB, −4.9 dB, and 340 <italic>μ</italic>m).
Promoting the Leadership Development of Girls through Physical Education and Sport

Leadership is a powerful life skill that influences the future of our local, national and global communities. Despite the many positive and productive changes observed in the leadership opportunities for women and girls, they remain highly under-represented in positional leadership roles. The leadership development and empowerment of women and girls has become an increasingly popular topic in books, websites and “strong girl” advertisement campaigns. At a grassroots level, physical educators and coaches must attend to these efforts in novel ways, as physical education and sport provide unique opportunities to develop leadership skills. This article discusses recommendations grounded in both the academic literature and professional practice, including: (1) embracing leadership diversity and deconstructing gender stereotyping, (2) building networking and mentorship, and (3) encouraging girls to use their voice and exercise leadership skills. Specific practical suggestions and a vignette are also provided to help physical educators and coaches maximize the leadership development of girls.
Short-Term Angiotensin II Treatment Affects Large Artery Biomechanics and Function in the Absence of Small Artery Alterations in Mice

Induction of hypertension by angiotensin II (AngII) is a widely used experimental stimulus to study vascular aging in mice. It is associated with large artery stiffness, a hallmark of arterial aging and a root cause of increased cardiovascular risk. We reported earlier that long term (4 week) AngII treatment in mice altered the active, contractile properties of the arteries in a vascular bed-specific manner and that, in healthy mice aorta, active contractile properties of the aortic wall determine isobaric aortic stiffness. Given the huge physiological relevance of large artery stiffening, we aimed to characterize the early (1 week) changes in the active properties of the aorta of AngII-treated mice. We were not able to detect a significant effect of AngII treatment on anesthetized blood pressure or abdominal aorta pulse wave velocity. Ex vivo biomechanical and functional studies of the aorta revealed increased arterial stiffness and altered vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) and endothelial cell reactivity. Interestingly, the AngII-associated changes in the aorta could be largely attributed to alterations in basal VSMC tone and basal nitric oxide efficacy, indicating that, besides structural remodeling of the arterial wall, dysfunctional active components of the aorta play a crucial role in the pathophysiological mechanisms by which AngII treatment induces arterial stiffness.
An Index for Quantifying the Degree of Torrefaction

Torrefaction, a thermochemical pre-treatment process, is used to enhance the properties of biomass to make it more compatible with solid fossil fuels. A quantitative index (TI) is proposed here to define the degree or quality of torrefaction especially for its use in the energy industries. Torrefaction index is defined as the ratio of energy density enhancement factor of the product at the specified condition to that at a reference condition, which is torrefaction at 300 °C for 60 min. The index, calculated for a wide range of data shows a linear dependence on torrefaction temperature. Numerical values of this index were in range of 0.93 to 0.95, 0.95 to 0.97, and 0.97 to 1.0 for light, medium, and severe torrefaction conditions, respectively. Based on a wide range of experimental data of woody biomass, two empirical correlations for mass and energy yields were developed. These correlations permitted prediction of TI without performing torrefaction of the biomass.
Research on Chinese Text Sentiment Classification Process

In recent years, with the rapid development of computers and social networks, online text information such as product reviews, news events and articles have grown exponentially, and automatic emotional classification of text information has become a research hotspot. This paper describes the current research status of Chinese text sentiment classification, namely preprocessing, feature extraction and sentiment classification, and expounds the problems existing in Chinese text sentiment classification and future research directions.
Bovine Mastitis Caused By Streptococcus uberis: Virulence Factors and Biofilm

Bovine mastitis is a multifactorial disease, commonly caused by microorganisms. The pathology affects dairy farms worldwide and causes significant economic losses. Different pathogens can cause the disease and they are classified as contagious, environmental and minor pathogens. Streptococcus uberis is a ubiquitous bacterium and is considered the main environmental agent. It is a very versatile microorganism able to use host factors to survive and colonize bovine mammary gland. Different virulence factors have been reported in S. uberis strains, such as proteoglycans and various proteins, which are secreting in milk facilitating the establishment of intramammary infections. Strategies for the control of environmental agents have less impact compared to those applied for contagious agents. Furthermore, intramammary infections are associated with biofilm formation which leads to antibiotic resistance making the treatment of recurrent infections hard. Thus, different alternative control methods have been proposed, as the use of bacteriocins and immunomodulatory compounds. The present review summarizes different studies about the characterization of S. uberis virulence factors and the importance of the studies to promote and design effective and novel therapeutic approaches.
Piezoelectric and ferroelectric materials and structures for energy harvesting applications

This review provides a detailed overview of the energy harvesting technologies associated with piezoelectric materials along with the closely related sub-classes of pyroelectrics and ferroelectrics. These properties are, in many cases, present in the same material, providing the intriguing prospect of a material that can harvest energy from multiple sources including vibration, thermal fluctuations and light. Piezoelectric materials are initially discussed in the context of harvesting mechanical energy from vibrations using inertial energy harvesting, which relies on the resistance of a mass to acceleration, and kinematic energy harvesting which directly couples the energy harvester to the relative movement of different parts of a source. Issues related to mode of operation, loss mechanisms and using non-linearity to enhance the operating frequency range are described along with the potential materials that could be employed for harvesting vibrations at elevated temperatures. In addition to inorganic piezoelectric materials, compliant piezoelectric materials are also discussed. Piezoelectric energy harvesting devices are complex multi-physics systems requiring advanced methodologies to maximise their performance. The research effort to develop optimisation methods for complex piezoelectric energy harvesters is then reviewed. The use of ferroelectric or multi-ferroic materials to convert light into chemical or electrical energy is then described in applications where the internal electric field can prevent electron–hole recombination or enhance chemical reactions at the ferroelectric surface. Finally, pyroelectric harvesting generates power from temperature fluctuations and this review covers the modes of pyroelectric harvesting such as simple resistive loading and Olsen cycles. Nano-scale pyroelectric systems and novel micro-electro-mechanical-systems designed to increase the operating frequency are discussed.
Calcium Handling in Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Cardiomyocytes

Background The ability to establish human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) by reprogramming of adult fibroblasts and to coax their differentiation into cardiomyocytes opens unique opportunities for cardiovascular regenerative and personalized medicine. In the current study, we investigated the Ca2+-handling properties of hiPSCs derived-cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). Methodology/Principal Findings RT-PCR and immunocytochemistry experiments identified the expression of key Ca2+-handling proteins. Detailed laser confocal Ca2+ imaging demonstrated spontaneous whole-cell [Ca2+]i transients. These transients required Ca2+ influx via L-type Ca2+ channels, as demonstrated by their elimination in the absence of extracellular Ca2+ or by administration of the L-type Ca2+ channel blocker nifedipine. The presence of a functional ryanodine receptor (RyR)-mediated sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca2+ store, contributing to [Ca2+]i transients, was established by application of caffeine (triggering a rapid increase in cytosolic Ca2+) and ryanodine (decreasing [Ca2+]i). Similarly, the importance of Ca2+ reuptake into the SR via the SR Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA) pump was demonstrated by the inhibiting effect of its blocker (thapsigargin), which led to [Ca2+]i transients elimination. Finally, the presence of an IP3-releasable Ca2+ pool in hiPSC-CMs and its contribution to whole-cell [Ca2+]i transients was demonstrated by the inhibitory effects induced by the IP3-receptor blocker 2-Aminoethoxydiphenyl borate (2-APB) and the phosopholipase C inhibitor U73122. Conclusions/Significance Our study establishes the presence of a functional, SERCA-sequestering, RyR-mediated SR Ca2+ store in hiPSC-CMs. Furthermore, it demonstrates the dependency of whole-cell [Ca2+]i transients in hiPSC-CMs on both sarcolemmal Ca2+ entry via L-type Ca2+ channels and intracellular store Ca2+ release.
A founder's heritage: the development of organizational identity

The purpose of this paper is to understand how a former family firm strategically makes use of the founder's legacy to preserve its organizational identity. Following a single case study approach, it draws on rich empirical material from semi-structured interviews and extensive archival data. We show how central organizational activities are affected by a founder's heritage long after the formal exit has taken place, illustrating the central, enduring, and distinctive elements of organizational identity a founder has. Regardless of ownership forms, the family company founder's legacy is used to legitimize new owners and maintain the organization's identity. However, centripetal moves complicate the preservation of the organizational identity, whereas a high focus on value leveraging in another ownership form opens up for centrifugal approaches which strengthen the entrepreneurial dimension of organizational identity.
Treatment Modalities for Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF) - Current State of Evidence and Future Perspective

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) accounts for approximately half of patients with chronic heart failure and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. To date, there are no approved therapies available for reducing mortality or hospitalizations for these patients. The failure to develop successful therapies for the management of HFpEF may be because of the poor understanding of the pathophysiology of HFpEF, inadequate standardization of the HFpEF diagnosis, the lack of strict definition and inadequate differentiation of disease subtypes. Several newer approaches, including Neprilysin inhibition therapy, offer promise for a new era of HFpEF treatment. This review article comprehensively summarizes the current state of evidence for the development of the therapies for HFpEF and the future/ongoing studies.