Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Active Mechanism Network Coding Algorithm based on Multi-channel Sensing

In view of the low efficiency and poor coding performance, an active mechanism network coding algorithm based on multi-channel sensing is proposed. The algorithm first establishes a system model to analyze the work pattern of network coding, then selects the minimum sample as cost function and adopts the multi-channel sensing to examine the coding effect of relay node, which makes the network to learn from the coding effect of relay node so as to send the source information to the relay node with better encoding effect. In order to reduce encoding error rate, active mechanism is adopted to improve the capability of network decoding, where the mechanism uses the transmit power of source node and the size of source information to control terminal decoding error rate. The experiment and simulation results show that our proposed network coding algorithm has a very good effect on encoding and decoding processes and can effectively reduce the network overhead
Tissue repair and regeneration in Drosophila imaginal discs

Exploring the mechanisms involved in tissue regeneration is one of the main challenges in biology and biomedicine. Multiple examples of tissue regeneration exist across the animal phyla, ranging from the recovery of the whole animal (e.g. flatworms) to the limited capability of the human liver. Studies performed in the 1960s showed that Drosophila imaginal discs are able to regenerate. This property, together with multiple genetic tools available, make fly an excellent model for the study of the regenerative process. Here we present an overview of the use of Drosophila for the study of regeneration and describe major recent advances in the understanding of this process. Current studies in Drosophila have unraveled some of the pathways and factors needed for a tissue to regenerate. Many observations point to the reuse of developmental programs and genetic reprogramming to drive regeneration. We discuss how this reprogramming could be orchestrated by the initial activity of the JNK pathway.
Correlative Light Electron Microscopy: Connecting Synaptic Structure and Function

Many core paradigms of contemporary neuroscience are based on information obtained by electron or light microscopy. Intriguingly, these two imaging techniques are often viewed as complementary, yet separate entities. Recent technological advancements in microscopy techniques, labeling tools, and fixation or preparation procedures have fueled the development of a series of hybrid approaches that allow correlating functional fluorescence microscopy data and ultrastructural information from electron micrographs from a singular biological event. As correlative light electron microscopy (CLEM) approaches become increasingly accessible, long-standing neurobiological questions regarding structure-function relation are being revisited. In this review, we will survey what developments in electron and light microscopy have spurred the advent of correlative approaches, highlight the most relevant CLEM techniques that are currently available, and discuss its potential and limitations with respect to neuronal and synapse-specific applications.
Mode-Based Method for Matching of Pre- and Postevent Remotely Sensed Images

With the continuing increase in the number of images collected every day from different sensors, automated registration of multisensor/multispectral images has become a very important issue. This is particularly true when pre- and postevent image comparison is concerned: For this particular application, the requirement of obtaining the earliest possible postevent image imposes the use of data potentially showing strongly different characteristics with respect to the pre-event image. Strongly inhomogeneous image pairs require robust automatic registration techniques. Resolution-independent feature-based registration is naturally preferred over correlation-based registration where data are inhomogeneous. In this letter, we propose a mode-based feature matching scheme, formerly invented for computer vision application and adapted in this letter to pre- and postevent matching. We list a few weak points in the original technique when used for this particular application and illustrate how a significant improvement was obtained by modifying the algorithm. Three real cases of pre- and postevent feature matching on high resolution satellite images are shown and discussed.
Involvement of subcellular organelles in inflammatory pain-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis in the rat hepatocytes.

BACKGROUND Subcutaneous injection of formalin in the plantar surface of rat's hind paw is frequently used as an animal model to study pain associated with inflammation. The pain produced by formalin test differs significantly from that of acute nociceptive tests. In this study, we first investigated the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for chronic inflammatory pain-induced damage in the rat hepatocytes and finally we tried to figure out whether both selective (celecoxib) and nonselective (acetylsalicylic acid) cyclo-oxygenase inhibitors could protect hepatocytes against pain-induced damage. METHODS The male Wistar rats were divided in one-, four-, and seven-day pain groups. Twenty-four hours prior to pain induction with subcutaneous injection of 5% formalin into the hind paw, acetylsalicylic acid or celecoxib was administered to the animals of similar one-, four-, and seven-day pain groups. A no-pain (control) group was also considered for each of the experiments. RESULTS Our results showed a significant rise in both formation of reactive oxygen species and collapse in the mitochondrial membrane potential (%Delta Psi m) in all pain groups (P<0.05). Significant lysosomal membrane damage and hepatocyte proteolysis were only seen in one-and four-day pain groups (P<0.05). Caspase 3 activity also showed a significant (P<0.05) rise in all three pain groups. CONCLUSION Formation of reactive oxygen species and mitochondrial/lysosomal damages were significantly inhibited by both acetylsalicylic acid and celecoxib in hepatocytes of all pain- suffering animals. Nonetheless, celecoxib's tendency to raise caspase 3 activities, suggested that it accelerates the apoptosis in hepatocytes of pain-suffering animals. Our results showed that the pain per se, could initiate some harmful signals that affect other cells other than neurons; these malicious signals could be magnified by use of some analgesics particularly selective cyclo-oxygenase inhibitors.
Overexpression, Purification and Characterisation of the Plasmodium falciparum Hsp70-z (PfHsp70-z) Protein

Six Hsp70-like genes are represented on the genome of Plasmodium falciparum. Of these two occur in the cytosol: P. falciparum Hsp70-z (PfHsp70-z) and PfHsp70-1. PfHsp70-1 is a well characterised canonical Hsp70 that facilitates protein quality control and is crucial for the development of malaria parasites. There is very little known about PfHsp70-z. However, PfHsp70-z is known to be essential and is implicated in suppressing aggregation of asparagine-rich proteins of P. falciparum. In addition, its expression at the clinical stage of malaria correlates with disease prognosis. Based on structural evidence PfHsp70-z belongs to the Hsp110 family of proteins. Since Hsp110 proteins have been described as nucleotide exchange factors (NEFs) of their canonical Hsp70 counterparts, it has been speculated that PfHsp70-z may serve as a NEF of PfHsp70-1. In the current study, P. falciparum cells cultured in vitro were subjected to heat stress, triggering the enhanced expression of PfHsp70-z. Biochemical assays conducted using recombinant PfHsp70-z protein demonstrated that the protein is heat stable and possesses ATPase activity. Furthermore, we observed that PfHsp70-z is capable of self-association. The structural-functional features of PfHsp70-z provide further evidence for its role as a chaperone and possible nucleotide exchange factor of PfHsp70-1.
Rain Estimation from Infrared and Visible GOES Satellite Data

Abstract An automated statistical pattern recognition technique is presented that uses visible and IR satellite imagery to estimate instantaneous surface rainfall rates. The technique uses both brightness and textural statistics to estimate rainfall in 10 × 10 pixel arrays of satellite data. Each array is centered over one of 137 Service A weather stations scattered over southeastern United States. Surface reports from these stations obtained during a 30 day period in August of 1979 are used to ground truth the technique. The technique classifies each 10 × 10 array into one of three categories: no rain, light rain, moderate/heavy rain. Cross-validation is used to estimate classification errors; results of these estimates yielded an overall error rate of 35% when both visible and IR data are used. When only visible or IR data are used the overall error rates are 39% and 42%, respectively. In addition to the three class problem, the two class problem of classifying rain / no rain is studied. Overall error r.
Holy cow!Wait ’til next year! A closer look at the brand loyalty of Chicago Cubs baseball fans

This study examined several factors related to the brand loyalty exhibited by fans of the Chicago Cubs major league baseball team. A total of 371 patrons of a restaurant located in Wrigleyville were surveyed prior to Cubs games at Wrigley Field. Working from a tripartite model of brand loyalty, it was predicted that, compared to less loyal fans, die‐hard (extremely loyal) Cubs fans would demonstrate different attitudes and behaviors regarding the Chicago Cubs. Several hypotheses were developed and tested using descriptive statistics, cross‐tabulations, and ANOVA procedures. Significant differences between the two fan groups were found in the areas of brand loyalty, baseball knowledge, childhood exposure to Cubs’ games, frequency of Cubs’ game attendance, and likelihood of purchasing Cubs paraphernalia. A variety of managerial implications are drawn from the results and future research suggestions are provided.
Constructing Understandings through Play in the Early Years

Abstract This article explores the role of play in one specific area of cognitive development. It is suggested that children's engagement in shared pretend play promotes the development of a representational theory of mind in at least two ways: through generating a sense of cognitive conflict as children encounter views and ideas that contrast with their own understandings (a Piagetian perspective) and through the construction of understandings that come from interacting in a social context and engaging in the shared construction of knowledge (a Vygotskian perspective). The compatibility of Piagetian and Vygotskian approaches is discussed. The article reports an investigation of the shared pretense of four‐year‐old children. This study involved two groups of children, one of which participated in a program aimed at increasing the complexity of the shared pretense in which children engaged and one group who did not participate in these experiences. From this study, the significance of complex shared preten.
Efficient order basis computation (abstract only)

Order basis (also known as 3/4-basis, minimal approximant basis), originally developed by Beckermann and Labahn in 1994 for rational approximation and interpolation problems, has recently been applied to many other important problems in polynomial matrix computation. These include column reduction, matrix inverse, determinant, and null space basis computation. Storjohann, in 2006, provided an efficient way to compute a part of order basis that is within a given degree bound. We extend Storjohann's result by providing a way to compute a complete order basis with a similar computational cos.
Evolutionary and wealth flows theories of fertility: empirical tests and new models.

There were 3 study communities: 1) the northern Ache in the subtropical forests of eastern Paraguay. During 2 field sessions 1981-82 and 1984-85 the Ache spent their time on hunting-and-gathering treks foraging and at the mission with 200 inhabitants where they engaged in horticulture fishing hunting and gathering. Reproductive histories of a sample of 174 Ache women indicated total fertility rate of 8.15 prior to contact with the society at large; fertility increased in the 1980s following sedentarization. 2) The Diamante consisted of some 200 individuals of mixed but mostly Piro ancestry in southeastern Peru at the base of the Andes. The Piro practiced horticulture shotgun hunting fishing gathering and some wage labor. The total fertility rate of 27 women currently living in the community was 8.2. The behavioral data were collected from August 1988 to June 1989. 3) The Yomiwato consisted of 105 Machiguenga in southeastern Peru subsisting upon swidden horticulture bow-and-arrow hunting fishing and gathering. The total fertility rate of 22 women was 8.1. The data were collected from September 1988 to May 1989. The average Machiguenga child under the age of 18 consumed 2120 calories per day but produced only 500 calories daily during the period from birth to age 18. Machiguenga adults on the other hand produced caloric surpluses starting at about age 20. The average Piro child consumed about 2300 calories per day and produced only 370. The average adult over age 60 produced some 6600 calories but consumed only around 2500. On average Ache children consumed 2500 calories and acquired about 560 calories. These results have negative implications for Caldwells wealth flows hypothesis.
Percepción de las Prácticas Éticas en las Organizaciones Chilenas

The main objective of this paper is to verify if the employees perceive that their managers, supervisors or co-workers demonstrate ethical practices in the organization. The instrument of data collection was obtained from the translation and adaptation of a questionnaire used by the Ethics Resource Center de Washington D.C in the National Business Ethics Survey (2003). Sample was probabilistic and aproportionally stratified by region and socioeconomic characteristics with a total sample size of 510 individuals. The main findings are that in general the high executives were well evaluated with respect to give good examples of ethical conduct to their employees, evaluation that share the supervisors who are perceived as reliable of their commitments and promises, and in relation to the ethical evaluation among co-workers good examples of ethical conduct are observed.
New Methods for Course Development and Management in Engineering Education

The application of a virtual learning environment has become widespread in Hungarian engineering education. Questions of quality and adaptivity are increasingly gaining dominance, manifested in course development and course management which takes the individual specialities of learners well into consideration. In order to increase the adaptivity of the learning process, we need to have exact and relevant information on the learner’s learning characteristics and preferred learning strategies in an online environment. In this we may be aided by web mining methods, which process data from interaction between the learner and the learning objects. By the application of these methods we were trying to find an answer to the question whether any conclusions from the patterns of online learning activities were to be drawn as to be preferred learning characteristics, methods and strategies and also whether the major variables of online learning behavior were possible to define.
Effects of probiotic Lactobacillus brevis KB290 on incidence of influenza infection among schoolchildren: an open-label pilot study

We investigated the efficacy of dietary consumption of Lactobacillus brevis KB290 (KB290) against influenza in humans by a preliminary intervention study on elementary schoolchildren, using a commercially available probiotic drink. Subjects were divided into Groups A and B, and an open‐label, parallel‐group trial was conducted in two 8‐week periods at a 1‐month interval in winter 2013/2014. Group A was provided with a bottle of the test drink containing KB290 (about 6 billion colony‐forming units) every school day in the first period and had no treatment in the second period, and vice versa for Group B. Epidemic influenza was not observed during the first period and only two of 1783 subjects were diagnosed. In the second period, the incidence of influenza in Groups A (no treatment) and B (provided the test drink) was 23·9 and 15·7%, respectively, and the difference was statistically significant (P < 0·001). The reduction in the incidence of influenza by KB290 consumption was especially remarkable in unvaccinated individuals. This is believed to be the first study to show a probiotic food reducing the incidence of influenza in schoolchildren, although further studies are needed to confirm the effectiveness of the probiotic strain KB290.
Oligotyping: differentiating between closely related microbial taxa using 16S rRNA gene data

Bacteria comprise the most diverse domain of life on Earth, where they occupy nearly every possible ecological niche and play key roles in biological and chemical processes. Studying the composition and ecology of bacterial ecosystems and understanding their function are of prime importance. High‐throughput sequencing technologies enable nearly comprehensive descriptions of bacterial diversity through 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons. Analyses of these communities generally rely upon taxonomic assignments through reference data bases or clustering approaches using de facto sequence similarity thresholds to identify operational taxonomic units. However, these methods often fail to resolve ecologically meaningful differences between closely related organisms in complex microbial data sets. In this paper, we describe oligotyping, a novel supervised computational method that allows researchers to investigate the diversity of closely related but distinct bacterial organisms in final operational taxonomic units identified in environmental data sets through 16S ribosomal RNA gene data by the canonical approaches. Our analysis of two data sets from two different environments demonstrates the capacity of oligotyping at discriminating distinct microbial populations of ecological importance. Oligotyping can resolve the distribution of closely related organisms across environments and unveil previously overlooked ecological patterns for microbial communities. The URL http://oligotyping.org offers an open‐source software pipeline for oligotyping.
Compiling with proofs

One of the major challenges of building software systems is to ensure that the various components fit together in a well-defined manner. This problem is exacerbated by the recent advent of software components whose origin is unknown or inherently untrusted, such as mobile code or user extensions for operating-system kernels or database servers. Such extensions are useful for implementing an efficient interaction model between a client and a server because several data exchanges between them can be saved at the cost of a single code exchange. In this dissertation, I propose to tackle such system integrity and security problems with techniques from mathematical logic and programming-language semantics. I propose a framework, called proof-carrying code, in which the extension provider sends along with the extension code a representation of a formal proof that the code meets certain safety and correctness requirements. Then, the code receiver can ensure the safety of executing the extension by validating the attached proof. The major advantages of proof-carrying code are that it requires a simple trusted infrastructure and that it does not impose run-time penalties for the purpose of ensuring safety. In addition to the concept of proof-carrying code, this dissertation contributes the idea of certifying compilation. A certifying compiler emits, in addition to optimized target code, function specifications and loop invariants that enable a theorem-proving agent to prove non-trivial properties of the target code, such as type safety. Such a certifying compiler, along with a proof-generating theorem prover, is not only a convenient producer of proof-carrying code but also a powerful software-engineering tool. The certifier also acts as an effective referee for the correctness of each compilation, thus simplifying considerably compiler testing and maintenance. A complete system for proof-carrying code must also contain a proof-generating theorem prover for the purpose of producing the attached proofs of safety. This dissertation shows how standard decision procedures can be adapted so that they can produce detailed proofs of the proved predicates and also how these proofs can be encoded compactly and checked efficiently. Just like for the certifying compiler, a proof-generating theorem prover has significant software-engineering advantages over a traditional prover. In this case, a simple proof checker can ensure the soundness of each successful proving task and indirectly assist in testing and maintenance of the theorem prover.
English as economic value: facts and fallacies

Provides an overview of the economic approach to the question of the value of English. Discusses reasons why this question is attracting increasing attention, and examines the labor market in Switzerland, presenting methodological aspects and providing fundamental statistical reports. Results indicate that for Switzerland as a whole, English skills can be associated with high and statistically robust wage premia.
Some Evidence on Race, Welfare Reform, and Household Income

In 1996, federal welfare-reform legislation eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Numerous studies have estimated impacts of reform on welfare caseloads, employment, earnings, family structure, income, and poverty. Two principal challenges to identifying TANF’s impact have been discussed in the literature. First, factors other than welfare reform should have increased household income. It is well known that reform occurred during a period of strong economic performance. While the unemployment rate for blacks fell to the lowest level ever recorded, wages for low-skill groups rose for the first time since the 1970’s. Further, other policy changes in the second half of the 1990’s focused on improving the economic status of the disadvantaged. Examples include expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), minimum wages, and public health insurance (Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program). Second, TANF was implemented in all states over just 16 months (between September 1996 and January 1998), leaving only limited scope for identifying impacts of TANF through timing across states. While these challenges are well known, their implications for interpreting estimated TANF impacts in nonexperimental studies are not. In this paper, we do four things. First, we discuss the identification of TANF effects in a prototypical nonexperimental model. We show that if TANF effects are the same in every year, then the lack of time variation in TANF implementation is not problematic. However, if TANF and trend effects are allowed to vary over time in an unrestricted fashion, then TANF effects for later years are unidentified. Second, we propose a method for bounding impacts in light of this identification problem. Third, we apply this method to analyze the impact of TANF on household income for a sample of children in the Current Population Survey (CPS) covering calendar years 1988–1999. Fourth, we document significant heterogeneity in the association between household income and both TANF and residual factors across white, Hispanic, and black children.