Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combinatorial Synthesis of Genetic Networks

A central problem in biology is determining how genes interact as parts of functional networks. Creation and analysis of synthetic networks, composed of well-characterized genetic elements, provide a framework for theoretical modeling. Here, with the use of a combinatorial method, a library of networks with varying connectivity was generated in Escherichia coli. These networks were composed of genes encoding the transcriptional regulators LacI, TetR, and lambda CI, as well as the corresponding promoters. They displayed phenotypic behaviors resembling binary logical circuits, with two chemical “inputs” and a fluorescent protein “output. ” Within this simple system, diverse computational functions arose through changes in network connectivity. Combinatorial synthesis provides an alternative approach for studying biological networks, as well as an efficient method for producing diverse phenotypes in vivo.
Comparing Ginsenoside Production in Leaves and Roots of Wild American Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius)

American ginseng, Panax quinquefolius L. , is an herbaceous perennial species that is destructively harvested for its bioactive compounds called ginsenosides. The demand for this herb fosters illegal poaching and over-harvesting that reduces genetic variability and population viability. Five wild populations in western North Carolina were studied to better understand the production of ginsenosides in leaf and root tissues. Total ginsenoside concentration was significantly higher in leaves than roots, though total yield was higher in roots due to greater root biomass. However, some ginsensosides (Rb2, Rd and Re) had higher or more consistent yields in leaves than roots, so might be developed into a sustainable source of these medicinally-active compounds. Additionally, we identified regional root chemotypes that differed in the production of the ginsenosides Rg1 and Re and could be developed into regional cultivars depending on the desired panel of ginsenosides.
OpenCL-accelerated Point Feature Histogram and Its Application in Railway Track Point Cloud Data Processing

To meet the requirements of railway track point cloud processing, an OpenCL-accelerated Point Feature His-togram method is proposed using heterogeneous computing to improve the low computation efficiency. Ac-cording to the characteristics of parallel computing of OpenCL, the data structure for point cloud storage is re-configured. With the kernel performance analysis by CodeXL, the data reading is improved and the load of ALU is promoted. In the test, it obtains 1.5 to 40 times speedup ratio compared with the original functions at same precision of CPU algorithm, and achieves better real-time performance and good compatibility to PCL.
The electrical characteristics and device applications of metal oxide nanowires

Metal oxide and semiconductor nanowires have shown great potential as the basis for electronic devices which are compatible with a wide range of device substrates, including transparent or flexible substrates. The development of such nanowirebased devices, however, currently presents several outstanding challenges. Besides the various issues related to the growth of nanowires, the commercial applications of these materials depend critically on the development of scalable methods for achieving nanowire assembly and integration. In order to address such manufacturability issues, a thin-film transistor (TFT) based upon metal oxide nanowires is characterized in order to show that it is possible to fabricate nanowire devices which offer both high-performance levels and compatibility with transparent and flexible device substrates. Instead of directly depositing semiconductor materials on glass or plastic as with typical TFT designs, in this work the low-temperature requirements of glass and plastic substrates are satisfied by employing a contact printing process to transfer synthesized nanowires from their growth substrate directly onto the device substrate. This method was shown to effectively achieve the isolation of the high-temperature processes required by single-crystalline material growth from the low-temperature conditions mandated by the device substrate. Semiconductor nanowires, such as metal oxide SnO2 or Ge-based nanowires, were
Residual charge and filtration efficiency of polycarbonate fibrous membranes prepared by electrospinning

Polycarbonate (PC) ultrafine fiber membranes with benzyl triethylammonium chloride (BTEAC) were prepared by electrospinning of PC/chloroform solution with different BTEAC contents. In the presence of BTEAC additive, the PC solution showed a better electrospinnability and led to thinner fibers with uniformity than the neat PC solution. The charge retention of the electrospun PC fibrous membranes with BTEAC was investigated in terms of additive content, membrane thickness and storage condition. The residual charge on the PC fibrous membrane was increased to 1 wt % BTEAC content, but thereafter gradually decreased up to 10 wt % BTEAC. In addition, the residual charge on the membrane was increased with increasing the membrane thickness, but was rapidly decreased at a high humidity condition in comparison with a low humidity. The filtration efficiency was examined for the fibrous membranes with or without BTEAC. The PC membrane with BTEAC had higher filtration efficiency than one without BTEAC, not affecting the pressure drop. The filtration efficiency between the PC membranes with or without residual charge was also compared. When the residual charge existed on the membrane, the membrane showed higher filter efficiency because of the enhanced filtration effect by an electrostatic attraction. Therefore, the PC fibrous membranes with BTEAC have a great potential as an electrets filter for air filtration. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2015, 132, 41340.
Experimental Evaluation of a CPT-Based Four-Leg Active Power Compensator for Distributed Generation

Four-wire microgrids (MGs) and distribution systems are inherently unbalanced with the presence of negative and zero sequence components in voltages and currents. In small autonomous systems, the imbalance, in addition to the harmonic distortion produced by nonlinear loads, can significantly affect the power quality, loadability, and stability of the system. Furthermore, in isolated networks with significant generation from intermittent renewable energy sources, the stiffness of the system is reduced and this could amplify the effects of imbalance on the stability and power quality. To mitigate some of these problems, a novel methodology based on the application of a four-leg active power filter is proposed in this paper. The control of the compensator is based on the conservative power theory augmented by resonant controllers. The behavior of the proposed system is demonstrated using an experimental prototype deployed in a laboratory scale MG.
On Fundamental Limitations of Proving Data Theft

We show software agents that operate on input plaintext, transmit the result, and have the property that characterizes the operation as theft of plaintext amounts to solving a hard cryptographic problem. Such agents employ what we call a "questionable encryption scheme" in which it is computationally intractable to determine if the output is an asymmetric ciphertext or nonce. We therefore show a fundamental computational limitation of information forensics
Influence Maximization in Continuous Time Diffusion Networks

The problem of finding the optimal set of source nodes in a diffusion network that maximizes the spread of information, influence, and diseases in a limited amount of time depends dramatically on the underlying temporal dynamics of the network. However, this still remains largely unexplored to date. To this end, given a network and its temporal dynamics, we first describe how continuous time Markov chains allow us to analytically compute the average total number of nodes reached by a diffusion process starting in a set of source nodes. We then show that selecting the set of most influential source nodes in the continuous time influence maximization problem is NP-hard and develop an efficient approximation algorithm with provable near-optimal performance. Experiments on synthetic and real diffusion networks show that our algorithm outperforms other state of the art algorithms by at least ~20% and is robust across different network topologies.
Cloning and characterization of the hrpA gene in the terC region of Escherichia coli that is highly similar to the DEAH family RNA helicase genes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

During the course of systematic nucleotide sequence analysis of the terC region of E.coli K-12 by using the ordered lambda phage clones, we found the presence of a gene, termed hrpA, that showed a high degree of sequence similarity to the PRP2, PRP16 and PRP22 genes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The products of these yeast genes are known to play their roles in mRNA splicing, and belong to a group of proteins collectively called the DEAH family. The hrpA gene is the first example of a DEAH family gene in prokaryotes. The N-terminal region of the protein it encodes contains conserved sequence stretches characteristic of an RNA helicase. Its molecular mass is calculated to be 146 kDa. Previously, a 135 kDa protein was identified by Moir et al. [J. Bacteriol. (1992) 174, 2102-2110] in this region which is most likely identical to that encoded by hrpA. The C-terminal region of the hrpA gene product seems to contain an RNA binding motif weakly resembling that of ribosomal protein S1 of E.coli. Disruption of the hrpA gene suggested that it is not essential for the growth of E.coli.
Microbial Synthesis of Alka(e)nes

Alka(e)nes are the predominant constituents of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels. They can be produced naturally by a wide range of microorganisms. Bio-alka(e)nes can be used as drop-in biofuels. To date, five microbial pathways that convert free fatty acids or fatty acid derivatives into alka(e)nes have been identified or reconstituted. The discoveries open a door to achieve microbial production of alka(e)nes with high efficiency. The modules derived from these alka(e)ne biosynthetic pathways can be assembled as biological parts and synthetic biology strategies can be employed to optimize the metabolic pathways and improve alka(e)ne production.
InSAR Observations of Low Slip Rates on the Major Faults of Western Tibet

Two contrasting views of the active deformation of Asia dominate the debate about how continents deform: (i) The deformation is primarily localized on major faults separating crustal blocks or (ii) deformation is distributed throughout the continental lithosphere. In the first model, western Tibet is being extruded eastward between the major faults bounding the region. Surface displacement measurements across the western Tibetan plateau using satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) indicate that slip rates on the Karakoram and Altyn Tagh faults are lower than would be expected for the extrusion model and suggest a significant amount of internal deformation in Tibet.
The Political Economy of Policy Delegation : The European Monetary Union , Campaign Strategy , and the Changing Salience of the Economy in Vote Choice ∗

The economic voting literature emphasizes that complex government structures lead voters to weigh the economy less in their voting calculus. While a number of institutional factors have been considered by the literature, these have largely been institutions that voters can directly punish through electoral mechanisms. These analyses have implicitly assumed that governments have the tools at their disposal to manage the economy. In recent years, this assumption has become increasingly problematic, particularly in the Eurozone. Within the European Union the European Central Bank (ECB) was designed to have both significant independence from the political process as well as strong tools at its disposal with which to manage the economy, reducing the effectiveness of national governments to manage their individual economies. This leads to a number of empirical and theoretical questions about the stability of economic voting in Europe over time as well as the mechanisms through which institutions shape voter beliefs, politician behavior, and levels of economic voting. ∗Prepared for the European Union Workshop at the University of Michigan. Please do not cite without author’s
Effects of antigen density and non-complement fixing antibody on cytolysis by alloantisera.

Murine alloantisera were prepared against a variety of isoantigens including H2.25, TL, and LyA2. These antisera were cytotoxic for thymocytes and tumor cells. Anti-TL antisera obtained early in the immunization yielded titration curves in which antibody killed more than 90% of the target cells and which gave sharp end points and relatively high titers. Antisera obtained later during immunization frequently gave distinct “prozones”, failed to destroy all of the target cells, and gave less well defined end points. An immunoglobulin fraction presumably containing non-complement-fixing (NCF) antibody was purified from this late antiserum. This fraction was capable of reducing the cytotoxic efficiency ofthe early antisera. These effects were also duplicated when early antisera were tested against cells whose antigenic content had been reduced on a genetic basis. Such cells were markedly less susceptible to cytolysis than were cells with a full antigenic content. This resistance could in part be abrogated by an increased antibody and/or increased complement concentration. It was concluded that susceptibility to cytotoxic antibody is strongly influenced by antigen density and that NCF antibodies exert their effects on cytotoxin determinations by reducing the effective concentration of antigen on the target cell.
A game theoretic approach for delay minimization in slotted ALOHA

This paper studies distributed choice of retransmission probabilities in slotted ALOHA. Both the cooperative team problem as well as the noncooperative game problem is considered. In previous work that has focused on the maximization of throughput, it was shown that in heavy load, this maximization is obtained at the cost of a huge delay of backlogged packets. This motivates us to investigate the delay minimization problem as well as the multicriterion problem of minimizing the average expected delay (or maximizing the throughput) subject to constraints on the expected delay of backlogged packets. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain optimal and equilibrium retransmission probabilities and expected delays analysis.
Clinical Outcomes of Patients Undergoing Rotational Atherectomy Followed by Drug-eluting Stent Implantation: A Single-center Real-world Experience

Background: Rotational atherectomy (RA) is used to improve procedural success of percutaneous catheter interventions (PCIs) of complex and heavily calcified coronary lesions. We report the clinical experience and outcomes in our institution with the use of RA, followed by drug-eluting stent implantation. Materials and Methods: Data of 81 patients treated with PCI and adjunctive RA were analyzed. Clinical follow-up for the occurrence of major adverse events (MAEs) was obtained in all patients and correlated with significant variables using multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis. Results: Mean age was 67.9 ± 9.2 years, 61.7% had diabetes, 20.9% had chronic kidney disease, and 48.1% had previous acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Mean SYNTAX score was 29.8 ± 12.2, with a 92.5% angiographic success rate achieved. In-hospital MAEs rate was 7.4% while mortality rate was 8.6%. On median follow-up of 12.2 months, incidence of MAEs of 13.5% with a 75% free incidence from MAEs at 34 months. Multivariate analysis revealed that a history of previous ACS, ejection fraction, neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio, platelet to lymphocyte ratio, SYNTAX score, burr to artery ratio, and attainment of angiographic success were significant predictors of MAEs. Conclusion: RA followed by drug-eluting stent implantation is a safe and effective method in improving procedural success as well as short- and long-term outcomes of PCI in our center. A combination of clinical and procedural factors is predictive for the occurrence of MAEs and should be taken into account in the application of this technique.
Design and evaluation of the RISE 1.0 learning system

Author(s): Domingos, Pedro | Abstract: Current rule induction systems (e.g. CN2) typically rely on a "separate and conquer" strategy: they induce one rule at a time, removing the newly covered examples from the training set after each step. This results in a dwindling number of examples being available for learning successive rules, which in turn causes several problems that adversely affect the accuracy of the resulting rules. The research reported here investigates the alternative: learning all rules simultaneously using the entire training set for each. A viable approach using this strategy is proposed and implemented in the RISE 1 system. Empirical comparison of the new system with CN2 suggests that "conquering without separating" performs similarly to its counterpart in simple domains, but achieves increasingly substantial gains in accuracy as the domain difficulty grows, without sacrificing speed.
Employing PLSA model and max-bisection for refining image annotation

We present a new method for refining image annotation by fusing probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) with max-bisection (MB). We first construct a PLSA model with asymmetric modalities to estimate the posterior probabilities of each annotating keyword for an image, and then a label similarity graph is built by a weighted linear combination of label similarity and visual similarity. Followed by the rank-two relaxation heuristics over the constructed label graph is employed to further mine the correlation of the keywords so as to capture the refining annotation, which plays a critical role in semantic based image retrieval. The novelty of our method mainly lies in two aspects: exploiting PLSA to accomplish the initial semantic annotation task and implementing max-bisection based on the rank-two relaxation algorithm over the weighted label graph to refine the candidate annotations generated by the PLSA. We evaluate our method on the standard Corel dataset and the experimental results are competitive to several state-of-the-art approaches.
Application of deep-learning algorithms to MSTAR data

In this paper, a new All-Convolutional Networks (A-ConvNets) is proposed and applied to Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) data. Conventional deep learning algorithms, especially the deep convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved many success state-of-art results. However, directly applying ConvNets to SAR data will yield severe overfitting because of limited data availability. The proposed A-ConvNets can significantly reduce the number of free parameters and the degree of overfitting. Average accuracy of 99.1% on classification of 10-class targets was obtained by applying A-ConvNets to MSTAR datasets.
Prognostic impact of apoptosis marker Fas (CD95) and its ligand (FasL) on bladder cancer in Egypt: study of the effect of schistosomiasis

Objective: The Fas–Fas ligand (FasL) system has been recognized as a major pathway for the induction of apoptosis in cells and tissues. Fas-mediated apoptosis is deeply involved in cancer cell death brought about by the immune system. This study was performed to determine the Fas and FasL expression in human bladder cancer and the impact of schistosomiasis infection. Material and methods: Of the 75 patients, 25 with chronic bilharzial cystitis and 50 with bladder cancer were included in this study. Ten control patients were included in the study, following their consent. Fas and FasL expressions in bladder tissue were determined by indirect immunohistochemistry using avidin-biotin-peroxidase complex (ABC) method. Results: The association of bilharziasis with malignancy raised the incidence of Fas positive immunoreactivity to 100%. The number of malignant cases positive for Fas decreased with progress of tumour grade and stage. All control cases were negative for FasL expression. The percentage of positive FasL malignant cases increased with increasing tumour grade or stage. Conclusion: Malignant bladder lesions express high levels of Fas and decreased expression of Fas is associated with disease progression. Urinary bladder carcinoma acquires the functional FasL during tumour progression that may induce apoptosis of anti tumour T lymphocytes. Fas and FasL are recommended to be considered important tumour markers to define aggressive bladder cancer and may be included in defining the surveillance protocol for superficial bladder cancer.
A new scheduling strategy for NUMA multiprocessor systems

This study examined the impact of multiprocessor scheduling strategies on the performances of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) shared-memory multiprocessor systems. A new scheduling algorithm named the Longest Extended Critical Path First (LECPF) algorithm is proposed here. The proposed algorithm schedules parallel tasks by considering complex communication options and the contentions of shared communication resources. It also ensures performance within a factor of two of the optimum for general directed acyclic task graphs (DATGs). Experimental results show the superiority of the LECPF algorithm over that of scheduling algorithms in the literature.
Using Comparable Corpora to Solve Problems Difficult for Human Translators

In this paper we present a tool that uses comparable corpora to find appropriate translation equivalents for expressions that are considered by translators as difficult. For a phrase in the source language the tool identifies a range of possible expressions used in similar contexts in target language corpora and presents them to the translator as a list of suggestions. In the paper we discuss the method and present results of human evaluation of the performance of the tool, which highlight its usefulness when dictionary solutions are lacking.
Streptococcal infections of skin and soft tissues.

Streptococcus pyogenes (group A in the Lancefield classification) is one of the most common human pathogens. Although this ubiquitous organism is responsible for a wide array of illnesses, most attention has focused on its relation to acute pharyngitis, because of the frequency of that condition and its potential for inciting acute rheumatic fever. The recent resurgence of invasive group A streptococcal infections,1,2 however, is a reminder that the pathogen can cause a variety of skin and soft-tissue infections, some of which are severe and even life-threatening. Streptococcal Pyoderma Pyoderma, or impetigo, is a localized, purulent infection of the .