Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pathogenicity and protective effect of rough mutants of Salmonella species in germ-free piglets

In this study, two stable, rough, streptomycin-sensitive Salmonella mutants with different types of genetic defects were used to colonize groups of germ-free (GF) piglets. The lipopolysaccharide (LPS) of Salmonella typhimurium SF 1591 was of the Ra chemotype (complete core), whereas the LPS of the S. minnesota mR 595 deep-rough mutant contained only lipid A and 2-keto-3-deoxyoctulosonic acid (Re chemotype). Both strains readily colonized the intestinal tracts of GF piglets and were stable during the whole experiment. All animals survived, and only transient fever was observed in some piglets colonized with the SF 1591 strain. Finally, streptomycin and virulent, smooth, streptomycin-resistant S. typhimurium LT2 were administered perorally 1 week later. All piglets colonized previously with the deep-rough mutant mR 595 died of sepsis, in contrast to piglets infected with the LT2 strain and colonized with the SF 1591 mutant, all of which survived. This difference is explained by the penetration of the mesenteric lymph nodes, spleen, and liver by great numbers of live bacteria in the latter case, resulting in prominent systemic and local immune responses. On the other hand, live bacteria were found only rarely in the mesenteric lymph nodes of animals colonized with the mR 595 strain and a negligible antibody response was observed.
Hypothesis: a Y-chromosomal gene causes gonadoblastoma in dysgenetic gonads.

The role of the human Y chromosome in the etiology of gonadoblastoma, a gonadal neoplasm, is considered and a two-part model is presented. According to this hypothesis: (1) There is a gene on the Y chromosome that strongly predisposes dysgenetic gonads to develop gonadoblastomas (Page, 1986) and (2) this postulated GBY gene (GonadoBlastoma locus on Y chromosome) has some physiological function in normal males. GBY may, for example, function in or prior to spermatogenesis in normal testes. Y-DNA hybridization analysis of individuals with gonadoblastoma and partial deletions of the Y chromosome should be of use in testing this proposal. To date, such studies suggest that GBY maps to the region that includes deletion intervals 4B to 7, i.e. it is located near the centromere or on the long arm of the Y chromosome.
Epstein–Barr virus infection: basis of malignancy and potential for therapy

The Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) is a human herpesvirus that is usually carried lifelong as an asymptomatic infection. EBV is the causative agent of infectious mononucleosis and has been linked to the development of several malignant tumours, including B-cell neoplasms such as Burkitt's lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease, certain forms of T-cell lymphoma, and some epithelial tumours, such as undifferentiated nasopharyngeal carcinoma and a proportion of gastric cancers. All these tumours are characterised by the presence of multiple extrachromosomal copies of the circular viral genome in the tumour cells and the expression of EBV-encoded latent genes, which appear to contribute to the malignant phenotype. An increasing understanding of the function of EBV latent genes and of the nature of the immune response to the virus is providing exciting new possibilities for the treatment of EBV-associated malignancies. For example, adoptive transfer of virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes has already been of value in the treatment of EBV-positive B-cell lymphomas arising in post-transplant patients, and this approach is currently being investigated in other EBV-associated tumours. In addition, gene therapy offers the opportunity to deliver agents that might directly interfere with the function of specific EBV genes. This review summarises the role of EBV in malignancy. In particular, it focuses on the latent proteins as a basis for understanding how EBV might contribute to the process of transformation. Strategies to target EBV in tumours, potentially providing alternative therapeutic approaches, are also discussed.
Economic evaluations of leukemia: A review of the literature

Objectives: Leukemia, together with lymphoma and multiple myeloma, are hematological malignancies, malignancies of the blood-forming organs. There are four major types of leukemia: acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). There is a growing amount of literature of the health economic aspects of leukemia. However, no comprehensive review is yet performed on the health economic evidence for the disease. Hence, our aim was to review and analyze the existing literature on economic evaluations of the different types of leukemia. Methods: A systematic literature search used electronic databases to identify published cost analyses and economic evaluations of leukemia treatments. After reviewing all identified studies, sixty studies were considered relevant for the purpose of the review. Results: The identified studies were published after 1990, with a few exceptions. Many of the identified economic evaluations in leukemia, particularly for ALL and AML, may be defined as cost-minimization analyses, where only the costs of different treatment strategies are compared. In CML, a new treatment, imatinib, was introduced in 2001 and several cost-effectiveness analyses have since then been conducted comparing imatinib with previous first line treatments. Conclusions: This review indicates that there is a shortage of cost-effectiveness information in leukemia. The introduction of new therapies will stress the need for new economic evaluations in this group of diseases. More information about the total costs, that is, including indirect costs, and quality of life effects would be valuable in future evaluations in leukemia.
Visual Analyses of Music History: A User-Centric Approach

Music history, referring to the records of users' listening or downloading history in online music services, is the primary source for music service providers to analyze users' preferences on music and thus to provide personalized recommendations to users. In order to engage users into the service and to improve user experience, it would be beneficial to provide visual analyses of one user's music history as well as visualized recommendations to that user. In this paper, we take a user-centric approach to the design of such visual analyses. We start by investigating user needs on such visual analyses and recommendations, then propose several different visualization schemes, and perform a pilot study to collect user feedback on the designed schemes. We further conduct user studies to verify the utility of the proposed schemes, and the results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed visualization, but also provide important insights to guide the visualization design in the future.
Marrow transplantation for thalassemia.

Despite modern therapeutic regimens, thalassemia major remains a severe disease with an uncertain ultimate prognosis. Alternative and more definitive forms of treatment are actively sought; bone marrow transplan­ tation is one of these. As of May 1984, data were available on 51 thalassemic children who had undergone the procedure: 29 of them are free of thalassemia 2 to 30 months after transplantation; 13 have died; 9 are alive with thalassemia after autologous reconstitution. Future developments in the field of transplantation should make the procedure safer and also render it available to the vast population of mUltiply transfused and hemosiderotic thalassemic patients who will not benefit from the improve­ ment of conventional therapy.
Virtual flash chips: Rethinking the layer design of flash devices to improve data recoverability

The market trend of flash memory chips has been going for high density but low reliability. The rapidly increasing bit error rates and emerging reliability issues of the coming triple-level cell (TLC) and even three-dimensional (3D) flash chips would let users take an extremely high risk to store data in such low reliability storage media. With the observations in mind, this paper rethinks the layer design of flash devices and propose a complete paradigm shift to re-configure physical flash chips of potentially massive parallelism into better “virtual chips”, in order to improve the data recoverability in a modular and low-cost way. The concept of virtual chips is realized at hardware abstraction layer (HAL) without continually complicating the conventional flash management software (i.e., flash translation layer (FTL)). The capability and compatibility of the proposed design are then verified by a series of experiments with encouraging results.
Role of sun exposure on nevus. First study in age-sex phenotype-controlled populations.

BACKGROUND These studies were designed to assess the influence of sun exposure on nevi in white people. To eliminate the confounding effect of age, sex, and phenotype, two parallel studies were conducted on people of the same age (17 to 24 years; median, 20 years old), sex (male), and phenotype: one in people with "red" phenotype (red or red-blond hair, white complexion on the inner part of the arm, and inability to tan) and one in people with "dark" phenotype (brown or black hair, dark complexion on the inner part of the arm, absence of freckles, and easy tanning without burning). RESULTS In both groups, comparison of nevus counts on the inner and outer side of the upper extremities and comparison of mean density of nevi (number per square meter) in always-exposed and never-exposed skin show that the number of nevi is higher in sun-exposed areas. The density of large and atypical nevi was maximal on intermittently sun-exposed skin while the density of small nevi was maximal on always-exposed skin. The number of large nevi on intermittently exposed skin correlated with cumulative intensive exposure during beach recreation in the red phenotype group. The number of large nevi was significantly higher in red phenotypes who repeatedly experienced severe sunburns in their first 20 years of life. CONCLUSIONS The number of nevi at the end of the second decade is influenced by cumulative sun exposure from birth. "Traumatizing" sun exposure, which is more frequent in the red phenotype than in the dark phenotype, has an influence on the number of large nevi and is therefore likely to make small nevi grow.
Using Internet Services to Manage Massive Evolving Information for Ubiquitous Computing Systems

A major challenge in building ubiquitous computing systems is the large variety of heterogeneous devices. Building applications that cope with this heterogeneity requires managing massive amounts of quickly evolving information, mapping among the various semantically-equivalent functionalities of devices. We advocate using Internet services to store and collect these mappings. We are implementing this hypothesis in the IMHome project, focusing on the spontaneous interaction of media creation, storage, and playback devices. To evaluate IMHome, we are developing metrics to measure the dependability of IMHome-based applications.
Biological Functionalities of Transglutaminase 2 and the Possibility of Its Compensation by Other Members of the Transglutaminase Family

Transglutaminase 2 (TG2) is the most widely distributed and most abundantly expressed member of the transglutaminase family of enzymes, a group of intracellular and extracellular proteins that catalyze the Ca2+-dependent posttranslational modification of proteins. It is a unique member of the transglutaminase family owing to its specialized biochemical, structural and functional elements, ubiquitous tissue distribution and subcellular localization, and substrate specificity. The broad substrate specificity of TG2 and its flexible interaction with numerous other gene products may account for its multiple biological functions. In addition to the classic Ca2+-dependent transamidation of proteins, which is a hallmark of transglutaminase enzymes, additional Ca2+-independent enzymatic and nonenzymatic activities of TG2 have been identified. Many such activities have been directly or indirectly implicated in diverse cellular physiological events, including cell growth and differentiation, cell adhesion and morphology, extracellular matrix stabilization, wound healing, cellular development, receptor-mediated endocytosis, apoptosis, and disease pathology. Given the wide range of activities of the transglutaminase gene family it has been suggested that, in the absence of active versions of TG2, its function could be compensated for by other members of the transglutaminase family. It is in the light of this assertion that we review, herein, TG2 activities and the possibilities and premises for compensation for its absence.
Exploiting Synergy Between Testing and Inferred Partial Specifications

The specifications of a program can be dynamically inferred from its executions, or equivalently, from the program plus a test suite. A deficient test suite or a subset of a sufficient test suite may not help to infer generalizable program properties. But the partial specifications inferred from the test suite constitute a summary proxy for the test execution history. When a new test is executed on the program, a violation of a previously inferred specification indicates the need for a potential test augmentation. Developers can inspect the test and the violated specification to make a decision whether to add the new test to the existing test suite after equipping the test with an oracle. By selectively augmenting the existing test suite, the quality of the inferred specifications in the next cycle can be improved while avoiding noisy data such as illegal inputs. To experiment with this approach, we integrated the use of Daikon (a dynamic invariant detection tool) and Jtest (a commercial Java unit testing tool). This paper presents several techniques to exploit the synergy between testing and inferred partial specifications in unit test data selection.
Educational technology for teaching and learning

Educational Technology in Teaching and Learning is an important and challenging aspect in higher education. The first theories on human behavior as behavior affected by technology are discussed in this essay. These learning theories are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. They provide a pedagogical and/or andragogical basis for understanding how students learn. Also, some of the approaches to teaching with technology, use of the best technological tools and appropriate type of instruction to enhance learning under Bloom's taxonomy are included. A general perspective is given of the advantages and disadvantages that technology offers for education.
Issues in Text-to-Speech Conversion for Mandarin

Research on text-to-speech (TTS) conversion for Mandarin Chinese is a much younger enterprise than comparable research for English or other European languages. Nonetheless, impressive progress has been made over the last couple of decades, and Mandarin Chinese systems now exist which approach, or in some ways even surpass in quality available systems for English. This article has two goals. The first is to summarize the published literature on Mandarin synthesis, with a view to clarifying the similarities or differences among the various efforts. One property shared by a great many systems is the dependence on the syllable as the basic unit of synthesis. We shall argue that this property stems both from the accidental fact that Mandarin has a small number of syllable types, and from traditional Sinological views of the linguistic structure of Chinese. Despite the popularity of the syllable, though, there are problems with using it as the basic synthesis unit, as we shall show. The second goal is to describe in more detail some specific problems in text-to-speech conversion for Mandarin, namely text analysis, concatenative unit selection, segmental duration and tone and intonation modeling. We illustrate these topics by describing our own work on Mandarin synthesis at Bell Laboratories. The paper starts with an introduction to some basic concepts in speech synthesis, which is intended as an aid to readers who are less familiar with this area of research.
STUDIES ON BACTERIOPHAGE

Phase I and Phase II Sh. sonnei exhibit differences in their susceptibility to the T series of bacteriophages. Both microorganisms are lysed by T2 and T6, but only the Phase II bacillus is lysed by T3, T4, and T7. Lysis of the Phase I or Phase II bacillus by T2 or T6 is not inhibited by the homologous type-specific antigen. In the presence of an appropriate cofactor, however, the lysis of Phase II Sh. sonnei by T3, T4, and T7 is specifically inhibited by the homologous somatic antigen but not by the Phase I antigen. The significance of these observations is discussed in respect to the nature of the virus receptor of these microorganisms.
ItCompress: an iterative semantic compression algorithm

Real datasets are often large enough to necessitate data compression. Traditional 'syntactic' data compression methods treat the table as a large byte string and operate at the byte level. The tradeoff in such cases is usually between the ease of retrieval (the ease with which one can retrieve a single tuple or attribute value without decompressing a much larger unit) and the effectiveness of the compression. In this regard, the use of semantic compression has generated considerable interest and motivated certain recent works. We propose a semantic compression algorithm called ItCompress ITerative Compression, which achieves good compression while permitting access even at attribute level without requiring the decompression of a larger unit. ItCompress iteratively improves the compression ratio of the compressed output during each scan of the table. The amount of compression can be tuned based on the number of iterations. Moreover, the initial iterations provide significant compression, thereby making it a cost-effective compression technique. Extensive experiments were conducted and the results indicate the superiority of ItCompress with respect to previously known techniques, such as 'SPARTAN' and 'fascicles'.
Hidden violence is silent rape: sexual and gender-based violence in refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands

Although women, young people and refugees are vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) worldwide, little evidence exists concerning SGBV against refugees in Europe. Using community-based participatory research, 223 in-depth interviews were conducted with refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands. Responses were analysed using framework analysis. The majority of the respondents were either personally victimised or knew of a close peer being victimised since their arrival in the European Union. A total of 332 experiences of SGBV were reported, mostly afflicted on them by (ex-)partners or asylum professionals. More than half of the reported violent experiences comprised sexual violence, including rape and sexual exploitation. Results suggest that refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands are extremely vulnerable to violence and, specifically, to sexual violence. Future SGBV preventive measures should consist of rights-based, desirable and participatory interventions, focusing on several socio-ecological levels concurrently.
DCT Based Digital Image Watermarking, De- watermarking & Authentication

This paper introduces an algorithm of digital image watermarking based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In this technique the embedding and extraction of the watermark is simple than other transform. In this algorithm watermarking, de watermarking of the image is done and it also checks the authentication of the watermarked image and de watermarked image. This paper also successfully explains digital image watermarking based on discrete Wavelet transform by analysing various performance parameters like PSNR,MSE,SNR and NC.
Mapping the Shh long-range regulatory domain

Coordinated gene expression controlled by long-distance enhancers is orchestrated by DNA regulatory sequences involving transcription factors and layers of control mechanisms. The Shh gene and well-established regulators are an example of genomic composition in which enhancers reside in a large desert extending into neighbouring genes to control the spatiotemporal pattern of expression. Exploiting the local hopping activity of the Sleeping Beauty transposon, the lacZ reporter gene was dispersed throughout the Shh region to systematically map the genomic features responsible for expression activity. We found that enhancer activities are retained inside a genomic region that corresponds to the topological associated domain (TAD) defined by Hi-C. This domain of approximately 900 kb is in an open conformation over its length and is generally susceptible to all Shh enhancers. Similar to the distal enhancers, an enhancer residing within the Shh second intron activates the reporter gene located at distances of hundreds of kilobases away, suggesting that both proximal and distal enhancers have the capacity to survey the Shh topological domain to recognise potential promoters. The widely expressed Rnf32 gene lying within the Shh domain evades enhancer activities by a process that may be common among other housekeeping genes that reside in large regulatory domains. Finally, the boundaries of the Shh TAD do not represent the absolute expression limits of enhancer activity, as expression activity is lost stepwise at a number of genomic positions at the verges of these domains.
Decision Trees for Ranking: Effect of new smoothing methods, new splitting criteria and simple pruning methods

In this work we investigate several issues in order to improve the performance of probabilistic estimation trees (PETs). First, we derive a new probability smoothing that takes into account the class distributions of all the nodes from the root to each leaf. This enhances probability estimations with respect to other previous approaches without smoothing or with Laplace correction. Secondly, we introduce or adapt some new splitting criteria aimed at improving probability estimations rather than improving classification accuracy, and compare them with other accuracy-aimed splitting criteria. Thirdly, we analyse the effect of pruning methods and we choose a cardinality-based pruning, which is able to significantly reduce the size of the trees without degrading the quality of the estimations. The quality of probability estimations of these three issues is evaluated by the 1-vs-1 multi-class extension of the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measure, which is becoming widespread for evaluating probability estimators, ranking of predictions in particular.
Mobile Agent Based Checkpointing with Concurrent Initiations

Traditional message passing based checkpointing and rollback recovery algorithms perform well for tightly coupled systems. In wide area distributed systems these algorithms may suffer from large overhead due to message passing delay and network traffic. Mobile agents offer an attractive option for designing checkpointing schemes for wide area distributed systems. Network topology is assumed to be arbitrary. Processes are mobile agent enabled. When a process wants to take a checkpoint, it just creates one mobile agent. Concurrent initiations by multiple processes are allowed. Synchronization and creation of a consistent global state (CGS) for checkpointing is managed by the mobile agent(s). In the worst case, for k concurrent initiations among n processes, checkpointing algorithm requires a total of O(kn) hops by all the mobile agents. A mobile agent carries O(n/k) (on the average) size data.