Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Text classification using symbolic similarity measure

Automatic text classification is a problem of assigning text documents to pre-defined classes. In order to classify text documents, a good set of text representation from the training set need to be extracted. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel method of representing a text document by the use of symbolic representations. Further, we make use of a new symbolic similarity measure to classify text documents. Extensive experimentations are conducted on various datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method gives better results when compare to state of the art techniques. In addition, as it is based on simple matching scheme it achieves classification within negligible time and thus it appear to be more effective in classification.
Detection of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in ground beef using the GeneDisc real-time PCR system

Escherichia coli O157:H7 and certain non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) serogroups have emerged as important public health threats. The development of methods for rapid and reliable detection of this heterogeneous group of pathogens has been challenging. GeneDisc real-time PCR assays were evaluated for detection of the stx1, stx2, eae, and ehxA genes and a gene that identifies the O157 serogroup followed by a second GeneDisc assay targeting serogroup-specific genes of STEC O26, O45, O91, O103, O111, O113, O121, O145, and O157. The ability to detect the STEC serogroups in ground beef samples artificially inoculated at a level of ca. 2–20 CFU/25 g and subjected to enrichment in mTSB or buffered peptone water (BPW) was similar. Following enrichment, all inoculated ground beef samples showed amplification of the correct set of target genes carried by each strain. Samples inoculated with STEC serogroups O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, O145, and O157 were subjected to immunomagnetic separation (IMS), and isolation was achieved by plating onto Rainbow agar O157. Colonies were confirmed by PCR assays targeting stx1, stx2, eae, and serogroup-specific genes. Thus, this work demonstrated that GeneDisc assays are rapid, sensitive, and reliable and can be used for screening ground beef and potentially other foods for STEC serogroups that are important food-borne pathogens worldwide.
Electrophysiological Effects of SKF83959 on Hippocampal CA1 Pyramidal Neurons: Potential Mechanisms for the Drug's Neuroprotective Effects

Although the potent anti-parkinsonian action of the atypical D1-like receptor agonist SKF83959 has been attributed to the selective activation of phosphoinositol(PI)-linked D1 receptor, whereas the mechanism underlying its potent neuroprotective effect is not fully understood. In the present study, the actions of SKF83959 on neuronal membrane potential and neuronal excitability were investigated in CA1 pyramidal neurons of rat hippocampal slices. SKF83959 (10–100 µM) caused a concentration-dependent depolarization, associated with a reduction of input resistance in CA1 pyramidal neurons. The depolarization was blocked neither by antagonists for D1, D2, 5-HT2A/2C receptors and α1-adrenoceptor, nor by intracellular dialysis of GDP-β-S. However, the specific HCN channel blocker ZD7288 (10 µM) antagonized both the depolarization and reduction of input resistance caused by SKF83959. In voltage-clamp experiments, SKF83959 (10–100 µM) caused a concentration-dependent increase of Ih current in CA1 pyramidal neurons, which was independent of D1 receptor activation. Moreover, SKF83959 (50 µM) caused a 6 mV positive shift in the activation curve of Ih and significantly accelerated the activation of Ih current. In addition, SKF83959 also reduced the neuronal excitability of CA1 pyramidal neurons, which was manifested by the decrease in the number and amplitude of action potentials evoked by depolarizing currents, and by the increase of firing threshold and rhoebase current. The above results suggest that SKF83959 increased Ih current through a D1 receptor-independent mechanism, which led to the depolarization of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons. These findings provide a novel mechanism for the drug's neuroprotective effects, which may contributes to its therapeutic benefits in Parkinson's disease.
Preventing Childhood Malaria in Africa by Protecting Adults from Mosquitoes with Insecticide-Treated Nets

Background Malaria prevention in Africa merits particular attention as the world strives toward a better life for the poorest. Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) represent a practical means to prevent malaria in Africa, so scaling up coverage to at least 80% of young children and pregnant women by 2010 is integral to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Targeting individual protection to vulnerable groups is an accepted priority, but community-level impacts of broader population coverage are largely ignored even though they may be just as important. We therefore estimated coverage thresholds for entire populations at which individual- and community-level protection are equivalent, representing rational targets for ITN coverage beyond vulnerable groups. Methods and Findings Using field-parameterized malaria transmission models, we show that high (80% use) but exclusively targeted coverage of young children and pregnant women (representing <20% of the population) will deliver limited protection and equity for these vulnerable groups. In contrast, relatively modest coverage (35%–65% use, with this threshold depending on ecological scenario and net quality) of all adults and children, rather than just vulnerable groups, can achieve equitable community-wide benefits equivalent to or greater than personal protection. Conclusions Coverage of entire populations will be required to accomplish large reductions of the malaria burden in Africa. While coverage of vulnerable groups should still be prioritized, the equitable and communal benefits of wide-scale ITN use by older children and adults should be explicitly promoted and evaluated by national malaria control programmes. ITN use by the majority of entire populations could protect all children in such communities, even those not actually covered by achieving existing personal protection targets of the MDG, Roll Back Malaria Partnership, or the US President's Malaria Initiative.
Implicit Contracts and Dominant Shareholders

This paper presents an efficiency argument that contributes to understand why corporate governance structures with a dominant shareholder are so prevalent in so many countries around the world. In an environment where outsiders cannot accurately monitor the performance of transactions made between firms and stakeholders, the existence of a controlling shareholder who is an insider to the firm's management allows for efficient contracting with stakeholders. Firms controlled by outside shareholders cannot sustain relationships with stakeholders, because managers of such firms have an incentive to falsely claim that transactions with stakeholders have produced an outcome that is unfavorable to the firm, and misappropriate the cash flows associated with the true outcome. To avoid being expropriated, in response to the announcement of an unfavorable outcome, the controlling party will fire the manager and it will refuse to make good on costly obligations toward the stakeholder. However, because outsiders cannot observe the transaction's true outcome, punitive actions by outside shareholders will occur even when the manager truthfully reports an unfavorable outcome. Since these misguided disciplinary actions reduce the ex-ante value of transactions to stakeholders, stakeholders only accept doing business with firms controlled by outside investors if the frequency of misguided disciplinary actions is not too high. Thus, where outside shareholders cannot target accurately disciplinary actions to opportunistic managers, insider control is required for efficient contracting with stakeholders. This efficiency benefit of insider control should be taken into account if one wants to explain the prevalence of firms featuring dominant shareholders with a hands-on approach to their firms' management.
Recent Developments in Targeting Carbonic Anhydrase IX for Cancer Therapeutics

Carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX) is a hypoxia-inducible enzyme that is overexpressed by cancer cells from many tumor types, and is a component of the pH regulatory system invoked by these cells to combat the deleterious effects of a high rate of glycolytic metabolism. CAIX functions to help produce and maintain an intracellular pH (pHi) favorable for tumor cell growth and survival, while at the same time participating in the generation of an increasingly acidic extracellular space, facilitating tumor cell invasiveness. Pharmacologic interference of CAIX catalytic activity using monoclonal antibodies or CAIX-specific small molecule inhibitors, consequently disrupting pH regulation by cancer cells, has been shown recently to impair primary tumor growth and metastasis. Many of these agents are in preclinical or clinical development and constitute a novel, targeted strategy for cancer therapy.
Vfold: A Web Server for RNA Structure and Folding Thermodynamics Prediction

Background The ever increasing discovery of non-coding RNAs leads to unprecedented demand for the accurate modeling of RNA folding, including the predictions of two-dimensional (base pair) and three-dimensional all-atom structures and folding stabilities. Accurate modeling of RNA structure and stability has far-reaching impact on our understanding of RNA functions in human health and our ability to design RNA-based therapeutic strategies. Results The Vfold server offers a web interface to predict (a) RNA two-dimensional structure from the nucleotide sequence, (b) three-dimensional structure from the two-dimensional structure and the sequence, and (c) folding thermodynamics (heat capacity melting curve) from the sequence. To predict the two-dimensional structure (base pairs), the server generates an ensemble of structures, including loop structures with the different intra-loop mismatches, and evaluates the free energies using the experimental parameters for the base stacks and the loop entropy parameters given by a coarse-grained RNA folding model (the Vfold model) for the loops. To predict the three-dimensional structure, the server assembles the motif scaffolds using structure templates extracted from the known PDB structures and refines the structure using all-atom energy minimization. Conclusions The Vfold-based web server provides a user friendly tool for the prediction of RNA structure and stability. The web server and the source codes are freely accessible for public use at “http://rna.physics. missouri.edu”.
HC-CART: A parallel system implementation of data mining classification and regression tree (CART) algorithm on a multi-FPGA system

Data mining is a new field of computer science with a wide range of applications. Its goal is to extract knowledge from massive datasets in a human-understandable structure, for example, the decision trees. In this article we present an innovative, high-performance, system-level architecture for the Classification And Regression Tree (CART) algorithm, one of the most important and widely used algorithms in the data mining area. Our proposed architecture exploits parallelism at the decision variable level, and was fully implemented and evaluated on a modern high-performance reconfigurable platform, the Convey HC-1 server, that features four FPGAs and a multicore processor. Our FPGA-based implementation was integrated with the widely used “rpart” software library of the R project in order to provide the first fully functional reconfigurable system that can handle real-world large databases. The proposed system, named HC-CART system, achieves a performance speedup of up to two orders of magnitude compared to well-known single-threaded data mining software platforms, such as WEKA and the R platform. It also outperforms similar hardware systems which implement parts of the complete application by an order of magnitude. Finally, we show that the HC-CART system offers higher performance speedup than some other proposed parallel software implementations of decision tree construction algorithms.
Single-session tDCS-supported retraining does not improve fine motor control in musician's dystonia.

BACKGROUND Focal dystonia in musicians (MD) is a task-specific movement disorder with a loss of voluntary motor control during instrumental playing. Defective inhibition on different levels of the central nervous system is involved in the pathophysiology. Sensorimotor retraining is a therapeutic approach to MD and aims to establish non-dystonic movements. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) modulates cortical excitability and alters motor performance. In this study, tDCS of the motor cortex was expected to assist retraining at the instrument. METHODS Nine professional pianists suffering from MD were included in a placebo-controlled double-blinded study. Retraining consisted of slow, voluntarily controlled movements on the piano and was combined with tDCS. Patients were treated with three stimulation protocols: anodal tDCS, cathodal tDCS and placebo stimulation. RESULTS No beneficial effects of single-session tDCS-supported sensorimotor retraining on fine motor control in pianists with MD were found in all three conditions. CONCLUSIONS The main cause of the negative result of this study may be the short intervention time. One retraining session with a duration of 20 min seems not sufficient to improve symptoms of MD. Additionally, a single tDCS session might not be sufficient to modify sensorimotor learning of a highly skilled task in musicians with dystonia.
How Feasible Are Star Wars Mid-air Displays

There has been wide interest and even enthusiasm towards 3D and mid-air displays for well over a century. Recently many kinds of "holographic" displays have been seen in sci-fi movies like Star WarsTM etc. Media or 3D display manufacturers nowadays often claim that a specific novel display is like the ones seen in Star Wars. We survey and assess if how and to what extent the Star Wars mid-air displays are realizable with contemporary display technology, what are the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and when we can expect the mid-air displays to take over the display market.
Dopamine D1 Receptors Facilitate GABAASynaptic Currents in the Rat Substantia Nigra Pars Reticulata

GABA neurons in the substantia nigra pars reticulata receive input from GABAergic fibers originating in the forebrain. The role of dopaminergic D1 receptors located on these fibers was investigated using tight-seal whole-cell recordings from visually identified pars reticulata neurons of rat substantia nigra slices. Nondopaminergic pars reticulata neurons were characterized by their electrophysiological properties. Postsynaptic currents evoked by minimal stimulation in the presence of ionotropic glutamate receptor antagonists were blocked by bicuculline, indicating that they were GABAA IPSCs. Evoked GABAA IPSCs were potentiated by D1 receptor agonists. After application of D1 receptor agonists, miniature IPSCs [recorded in the presence of tetrodotoxin (TTX) and the Ca2+ channel blocker Cd2+] increased in frequency but not in amplitude. Effects of D1 receptor stimulation were mimicked by forskolin, as expected, if a cAMP-dependent mechanism was involved. The D1 antagonist SCH23390 blocked the effects of the agonists, and perfusion with SCH23390 resulted in a reduction of evoked IPSCs. In TTX and Cd2+, which prevented dopamine release, the D1 antagonist had no effect on miniature IPSCs. Blocking of monoamine uptake by imipramine increased the amplitude of evoked IPSCs. We conclude that dopamine released from dendrites of dopaminergic neurons enhances GABA release in the pars reticulata of the substantia nigra through D1 receptors presumably located on striatonigral afferents. These D1receptors, thereby, can reinforce D1 receptor-mediated activation of striatal projection neurons that inhibit the inhibitory output neurons of the basal ganglia in substantia nigra.
Interference Analysis and Transmit Power Control in IEEE 802.11a/h Wireless LANs

Reducing the energy consumption by wireless communication devices is perhaps the most important issue in the widely deployed and dramatically growing IEEE 802.11 WLANs (wireless local area networks). TPC (transmit power control) has been recognized as one of the effective ways to achieve this goal. In this paper, we study the emerging 802.11a/h systems that provide a structured means to support intelligent TPC. Based on a rigorous analysis of the relationship among different radio ranges and TPC's effects on the interference, we present an optimal low-energy transmission strategy, called MiSer, which is deployed in the format of RTS-CTS(strong)-Data(MiSer)-Ack. The key idea of MiSer is to combine TPC with PHY (physical layer) rate adaptation and compute offline an optimal rate-power combination table, then at runtime, a wireless station determines the most energy-efficient transmission strategy for each data frame transmission by a simple table lookup. Simulation results show MiSer's clear superiority to other two-way or four-way frame exchange mechanisms in terms of energy conservation.
Capacity approaching analog fountain codes

In this paper, we propose an analog fountain code (AFC) to approach the capacity of the Gaussian channel in a wide range of signal to noise ratios (SNRs). The proposed code is rateless as the number of the generated coded symbols is potentially limitless; thus, enabling the transmitter to automatically adapt to the channel condition and sending as many coded symbols as required by the destination. Each coded symbol in AFC is directly generated from information symbols, by linearly combining them with real weighting coefficients. Weight coefficients and the degree of each coded symbol are chosen from predetermined weight set and degree distribution function, respectively. We further formulate an optimization problem to find the optimum weight set in order to maximize the efficiency of the proposed code. Simulation results show that the proposed code can approach the capacity of the Gaussian channel across a wide range of SNR values.
(Non-)BPS bound states and D-brane instantons

We study non-perturbative effects in four-dimensional = 1 supersymmetric orientifold compactifications due to D-brane instantons which are not invariant under the orientifold projection. We show that they can yield superpotential contributions via a multi-instanton process at threshold. Some constituents of this configuration form bound states away from the wall of marginal stability which can decay in other regions of moduli space. A microscopic analysis reveals how contributions to the superpotential are possible when new BPS states compensate for their decay. We study this concretely for D2-brane instantons along decaying special Lagrangians in Type IIA and for D5-branes instantons carrying holomorphic bundles in Type I theory.
Birthweight and mortality in adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND Small birth size may be associated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), whereas large birth size may predict increased risk of obesity and some cancers. The net effect of birth size on long-term mortality has only been assessed in individual studies, with conflicting results. METHODS The Meta-analyses of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) guidelines for conducting and reporting meta-analysis of observational studies were followed. We retrieved 22 studies that assessed the association between birthweight and adult mortality from all causes, CVD or cancer. The studies were systematically reviewed and those reporting hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) per kilogram (kg) increase in birthweight were included in generic inverse variance meta-analyses. RESULTS For all-cause mortality, 36,834 deaths were included and the results showed a 6% lower risk (adjusted HR = 0.94, 95% CI: 0.92-0.97) per kg higher birthweight for men and women combined. For cardiovascular mortality, the corresponding inverse association was stronger (HR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.85-0.91). For cancer mortality, HR per kg higher birthweight was 1.13 (95% CI: 1.07-1.19) for men and 1.04 (95% CI: 0.98-1.10) for women (P(interaction) = 0.03). Residual confounding could not be eliminated, but is unlikely to account for the main findings. CONCLUSION These results show an inverse but moderate association of birthweight with adult mortality from all-causes and a stronger inverse association with cardiovascular mortality. For men, higher birthweight was strongly associated with increased risk of cancer deaths. The findings suggest that birthweight can be a useful indicator of processes that influence long-term health.
An Online Algorithm for Learning over Constrained Latent Representations using Multiple Views

We introduce an online framework for discriminative learning problems over hidden structures, where we learn both the latent structure and the classifier for a supervised learning task. Previous work on leveraging latent representations for discriminative learners has used batch algorithms that require multiple passes though the entire training data. Instead, we propose an online algorithm that efficiently jointly learns the latent structures and the classifier. We further extend this to include multiple views on the latent structures with different representations. Our proposed online algorithm with multiple views significantly outperforms batch learning for latent representations with a single view on a grammaticality prediction task.
Spectral Covers

Spectral curves arose historically out of the study of differential equations of Lax type. Following Hitchin’s work [H1], they have acquired a central role in understanding the moduli spaces of vector bundles and Higgs bundles on a curve. Simpson’s work [S] suggests a similar role for spectral covers S̃ of higher dimensional varieties S in moduli questions for bundles on S. The purpose of these notes is to combine and review various results about spectral covers, focusing on the decomposition of their Picards (and the resulting Prym identities) and the interpretation of a distinguished Prym component as parameter space for Higgs bundles. Much of this is modeled on Hitchin’s system, which we recall in section 1, and on several other systems based on moduli of Higgs bundles, or vector bundles with twisted endomorphisms, on curves. By peeling off several layers of data which are not essential for our purpose, we arrive at the notions of an abstract principal Higgs bundle and a cameral (roughly, a principal spectral) cover. Following [D3], this leads to the statement of the main result, theorem 12, as an equivalence between these somewhat abstract ‘Higgs’ and ‘spectral’ data, valid over an arbitrary complex variety and for a reductive Lie group G. Several more familiar forms of the equivalence can then be derived in special cases by adding choices of representation, value bundle and twisted endomorphism. This endomorphism is required to be regular, but not semesimple. Thus the theory works well even for Higgs bundles which are everywhere nilpotent. After touching briefly on the symplectic side of the story In section 6, we discuss some of the issues involved in removing the regularity assumption, as well as some applications and open problems, in sect! ion 7. This survey is based on talks at the Vector Bundle Workshop at UCLA (October 92) and the Orsay meeting (July 92), and earlier talks at Penn, UCLA and MSRI. I would like to express my thanks to Rob Lazarsfeld and Arnaud Beauville for the invitations, and to them and Ching Li Chai, Phillip Griffiths, Nigel Hitchin, Vasil Kanev, Ludmil Katzarkov, Eyal Markman, Tony Pantev, Emma Previato and Ed Witten for stimulating and helpful conversations.